Chris Marinos would have been the only junior starter on last year’s Salisbury boys tennis team, a squad that had high expectations with so much experience returning. The rest of the Falcon starters would have been seniors.

But with the COVID-19 pandemic canceling the 2020 spring season, the Falcons never got that chance. And Marinos’ junior season was gone.

Fast forward to 2021 and Marinos, now a senior, slid into a leadership role at No. 1 singles. He recently capped off his singles season with solid outings in both the Colonial League and District 11 Class 2A tournaments.

“We would have had a really nice team last year,” Marinos said. “It would have been all seniors, and I would have been the only junior. This year it was just like me. All of the seniors were gone. So I recruited a lot of my close friends and soccer players. We got together and had a surprisingly good year.”

Marinos recently came up short in his first-round match at districts, falling to No. 7 seed Vincent Caruso (7-5, 6-2) of Blue Mountain. Marinos was actually leading in the first set before Caruso started his comeback.

“I was doing pretty good in the first set; I had him 3-1,” Marinos said. “Unfortunately he came back and it was 5-5. We had a really tough deuce point, and we were playing no advantage.

“He came back and won that first set and that was tough. I started making some simple mistakes that I shouldn’t have.”

Early on Marinos was placing his shots perfectly and attacking the net. But the senior Falcon ran into some obstacles in the second set.

“In the first set I was just hitting the shots hard to his back hand and coming to the net and trying to win some close balls,” Marinos said. “Then he started slicing me deep. And with the wind coming in, a lot of his shots were going deep and high. That was difficult for me to adapt to.”

He never lost confidence though and battled to the end, much like he did throughout the Colonial League tournament. As the No. 4 seed in the league’s No. 1 singles bracket, Marinos took down Palmerton’s Will Clifford in the first round, 8-4, before losing to top seed Spencer Goodman of Southern Lehigh in the semifinals. He placed fourth in the field at No. 1 singles.

“After the fist set, my coach was telling me that I was still very much in the match, and that it was a close one,” Marinos said. “It could have gone either way. I just had to right that game plan of doing what I do best and don’t make simple mistakes, like I did unfortunately.”

Nolan Grejda, also seeded No. 4 in the league No. 2 singles bracket, won his first match at leagues as well. He took down Bangor’s Dylan Beleno in the first round before Southern Lehigh’s Noah Toblin sent him into the third-place match.

Both Salisbury doubles teams faired well at leagues with each placing third. At No. 1 doubles, CJ Ekdahl and Baxter Reihman won two matches, including the third-place match against the tandem from Notre Dame (Green Pond).

At No. 2 doubles, Drew Hines and Danny Scialla upset the No. 3 seeded team from Notre Dame-Green Pond (8-2) as well for a third-place medal.