The Barrington boys’ varsity tennis team had plenty to celebrate this holiday weekend as it took home the Division I state championship title this past Saturday, May 25 at Slater Park. 

The Eagles defeated Wheeler 4-0 on their quest for the crown, their first since 1998. 

Earlier this season, Barrington High School coach Marvin Gordon had asserted that his team had something to prove following last year’s loss to Bishop Hendricken in the final. They proved to do just that, going on to claim an impressive undefeated regular season. 

After beating LaSalle Academy 4-1 in Thursday’s semifinal match, Barrington was more than ready to square off against second-seed Wheeler on Saturday. In the finals, Eric Zhang was the first to pick up a win for Barrington as he defeated Charlie Caiati, 6-2, 6-0. Owen Voigt followed that with Barrington's second win, as he defeated Kobe Kase 6-0, 6-0. 

The Eagles' double team of Alex Caizzi and Lucas Johnson defeated Troy Feng and Spencer Romain, the Eagles Jules Anton and Kevin Zhu defeated Declan Allio and Brandon Zhang, 6-1, 6-0. 

Most of Barrington's players will be back to compete again for the Eagles next season — Brian Donahue and Connor Kelly will graduate and Anton, an exchange student, will return to France next year. 

Individual tournament

Two of the Eagles’ key players throughout the entire season, junior Lucas Johnson and sophomore Alex Caizzi, took home another victory on Sunday, defeating Bishop Hendricken’s Will Healey and Nathan Palombo 6-3, 6-3 in the doubles’ finals of the individual state tournament. 

The duo spent most of the season as Barrington’s number two team but rose to the occasion after Connor Kelly and Brian Donahue fell to Healey and Palombo during the semifinals. 

Meanwhile, Barrington’s number one singles player, James Bogdanovic, came in second against Classical’s defending state champion Max Schmidhauser in the singles’ finals later that day. 

Schmidhauser had already defeated Barrington’s second and fourth seeds, Eric Zhang and Scott Sapolsky, respectively, before defeating Bogdanovic 6-4, 2-6 and 7-5 on Sunday.