MYRTLE BEACH — The Myrtle Beach High School girls tennis team got a second opportunity to compete for a state championship, and the Seahawks are making the most of it.
Two weeks after the S.C. High School League issued — then reversed — a season-ending forfeiture for a rule violation, Myrtle Beach will take on Riverside for the Class 4A state title on Nov. 7 at the Cayce Tennis Center.
“We’ve bonded as a team and it’s made us closer,” said senior No. 1 singles player Mary Hannah Morrison. “It’s been horrible, but honestly, it’s what has brought us together as a team. I don’t think we knew how bad we wanted it until we almost didn’t get the chance.”
Despite internal turmoil that involved parents hiring lawyers over the team’s player rankings and the high school league suspending first-year head coach Faith Langdale, Myrtle Beach has run the gauntlet against higher-seeded teams to reach the state final.
“The last two weeks have been very tough and emotional for them, but everything has worked out as best as it possibly could,” said Kyle Sleem, who was elevated from assistant coach to interim head coach. “I’m happy they get to decide when their season ends on the court.”
Order on the courts
It didn’t look like that would happen just a few weeks ago.
On Oct. 23, the high school league ruled that the Seahawks must forfeit all of their matches, including the playoff-opening victory over Bluffton, for failing to follow a ladder system that teams are required to adhere to in determining their lineup.
The league’s rules require teams to hold individual competitions within their squads in order to provide an accurate ranking of Nos. 1-5 singles. The rule prevents teams from strategically stacking their lineup in order to gain a competitive matchup advantage over an opponent.
The parents of star seventh-grader Emsley Chapin pointed out that she wasn’t allowed to challenge Morrison for the top spot, despite multiple attempts to schedule a match. When the league reviewed the evidence, they found Myrtle Beach in violation.
But the school appealed the decision, and the league’s executive committee voted 11-3 to overturn the ruling and reinstate the Seahawks, though they suspended Langdale for the remainder of the playoffs.
“There are rules that we have to follow,” committee member Michael Pettit said during that meeting, adding that he didn’t think the team gained a strategic advantage from the violation. “It would be in our best interest to allow these girls to continue to play their season since, you know, they’re just going on what they were told to do. And I don’t believe that they should be penalized.”
Sudden-life overtime
The Seahawks were in class Oct. 27 when they received text messages saying their season was back on. They made the cross-state trip to Aiken just a couple of hours later to score a 6-0 sweep.
They followed it with a 4-3 win over top-seeded West Florence on Oct. 29 — the first over the Knights for the Seahawk seniors. Myrtle Beach cemented its spot in the state final with a 5-0 sweep over Lucy Beckham on Nov. 4, setting up a winner-takes-all showdown Nov. 7.
“It’s been an awesome experience,” senior co-captain and No. 5 singles player Ava Anthony said. “(Former teammates) have been blowing up my phone saying, ‘This is the year!’ Even though it’s been an emotional roller coaster, I’m so grateful for my teammates. We’re all hungry to win it.”
Along with No. 3 and 4 singles Mary MaKay Gunter and Vera Sheffer, and the No. 2 doubles tandem of Hannah Shaeffer and Sahana Patel, the Myrtle Beach girls’ program has a friendly rival with the boys’ tennis team for bragging rights.
The girls’ teams have won 16 state titles to the boys’ 14, however, the boys have won four since the girls’ last state championship in 2015 — when the seniors were first-graders.
“It’s been 11 years and we’ve lost to the eventual state champion the last six years,” Morrison said. “When we got another chance, we approached it like ‘We’re going to give it all we’ve got. We got another opportunity to do this so let’s go out and show that we deserve it.'”