Liberty and Northampton’s four doubles teams fought to the finish last week at Liberty, but Matt Bilger and Tyler Markovich remained undefeated for the Hurricanes while Kaleb Missmer and Noah Riechelderfer still maintained their winning record for the K-Kids in the loss.

Neither pair thought they played their best, but with scores of 7-6, 6-4, there was no question that each challenged the other.

“They were a big, physical presence at the net. They were like a brick wall and got everything back,” said Bilger. “I don’t think we were getting enough crosscourt; just hitting it to the guy at the net, and that makes it easy for them.”

Markovich said the match with Northampton and the match with Freedom earlier in the season were the pairs’ closest.

“We haven’t really seen a strong net presence that much this year, so that kind of got in our heads when we were trying to return serves and just return balls in general, and it messed up our ground strokes,” Markovich said.

Missmer and Riechelderfer are relatively new partners at four doubles, but are enjoying their season immensely.

“We both could’ve done a little better, but we’re just having a good time, so it doesn’t affect us that much if we lose a point or so,” said Riechelderfer.

Still, Missmer knows the K-Kids could have won the first set.

“I was really bad in two or three games. I was just missing my shots,” Missmer said. “We keep playing like it’s 0-0 the whole time. That’s what we tell each other the whole game. A lot of is confidence, and if you’re confident while hitting it, and you’re winning the games, and you have momentum, you just keep playing, and the other team starts crumbling.”

That’s what could have happened to the ‘Canes in the second set when the K-Kids started a comeback after being down 0-4 and bringing the score to 3-4.

“It’s frustrating when we start up, and then we kind of collapse in the middle,” said Bilger. “Dawn (Liberty’s assistant coach) told us we need to move in rhythm with each other and keep the distance between each other as close as possible, which we did after she talked to us about that.”

Liberty’s eventual success at keeping the ball away from the Northampton player at the net became a challenge for the K-Kids too.

“They were doing a good job of that,” said Riechelderfer. “I didn’t get many hits in the front.”

The winning shot came from Markovich on an overhead hit crosscourt.

“It felt good,” he said. “It felt good just to finally be done with that, to just finish it.”

In other matches, Liberty won in singles matches with Anthony Ronca, 6-1, 6-1, Shayaan Farhad, 6-0, 6-1, and Roman Farhad, 6-1, 6-0.

Northampton won at first doubles with Dylan Domchek and Lucas Connolly, 8-2.

Liberty won the rest of doubles with Luke Appleman and Gavin Evans-Gartley, 6-0, 6-1, and Sid Tekumalla and Chris Giannaras, 6-2, 6-0.