La Cañada High boys’ tennis stays perfect with singles dominance

LA CAÑADA — Each match has taken on extra meaning for the La Cañada High boys’ tennis team this season, as the Spartans find themselves undefeated and ranked in CIF Southern Section Division II.

It ensured the Spartans wouldn’t overlook a Temple City squad that graduated its two best players and pushed them to a 12-6 Rio Hondo League victory at La Cañada High Tuesday.

“It was a good one because we lost to them twice last year,” La Cañada No. 1 singles player Joshua Kim said. “It was good to come out and win today.”

As has been the case in many matches, La Cañada was led by its singles with Kim and its No. 2 player Ryan Lee posting sweeps. Christopher Madsen also won two singles sets, 6-4, 6-0, for the Spartans, who improved to 9-0, 3-0 in league.

Lee dropped just three games, 6-2, 6-1, 6-0, while Kim earned a tougher sweep after just edging Temple City’s Brent Hong, 7-5, in the first match. Things got much easier from there for Kim, who his last two sets by scores of 6-0, 6-2.

La Cañada High Coach Will Moravec offered the most praise to the sweep of doubles team Leeho Lim and Harrison Zuk.

“Luckily, Harrison and Leeho swept,” Moravec said. “That really was the key to our victory today because it gave us the breathing room.”

Lim and Zuk swept, 6-2, 6-4, 6-3, for the Spartans, who had just one other doubles win from Nick Malone and Pat Finnigan, 6-4.

“We are undefeated right now, knock on wood; we’ve been doing pretty well,” Lim said. “We came out here today and weren’t too sure how well we’d do against Temple City, but I guess we did pretty well. The real challenge is going to be San Marino — of course, as always.”

La Cañada travels to San Marino Thursday at 3:30 p.m. to take on the top-ranked team in Division II.

“You should never play not to win,” Kim said. “Hopefully we can pull it out, it’s going to be tough, but we’ll see how it goes.”

“They have a lot of new freshmen so we have to test them and see,” Moravec said of the upcoming San Marino match. “It’s going to be tough because they’ve been crushing everybody — 17-1, 18-0 and stuff like that — so we’ll see what happens. We can only control what we can control.”