Match Report

By getting through Regionals 2 weeks ago, on Friday Morning, Nikita Syrota, Tim Jarvis, Sam

Harris and James Sclater of the Prep School travelled up to Bolton to play in the National School

Finals to represent Millfield! It was a long journey but it was worth it. On Saturday morning, we

had to play Warwick School from the Midlands. With all due respect to Warwick we headed into

the games strong favourites for this match due to being more experienced players and ultimately

this showed as we ran out 6-0 winners. Then we had to play Merchiston Castle who are based in

Edinburgh (Scotland). They nearly beat the favourites, Reeds in their first match so we went in

quite nervous but mostly confident because all of us were playing well earlier. They had just lost

by 2 points in the deciding match before. Luckily, they were pretty tired so we were the favourites

and we showed our class and destroyed them 6-0. Going into the final with Reeds, we hadn’t lost

a match yet and wanted to carry on our perfect form. With a fun Saturday night in the arcade, we

were all pumped and excited to play in the final.

At 9am on Sunday, our number 4, James Sclater got off to a great start, winning comfortably.

Unfortunately, the rest of the Reeds team outplayed us and went 3-1 up after the singles. Onto

the doubles, Nikita and James Sclater played a brilliant match and narrowly won to make the

score 3-2 them. Tim and Sam had to win to keep us in contention for the title and with the energy

of a lion, we cruised through our doubles match winning 6-2 against opponents who beat us in

singles. As the scores were 3-3, there had to be a decider. So 2 people from each team had to

play a doubles tie-Break to 10 points to win. It was really tight throughout the whole tie-break and

we went 9-8 so we had a championship point but the nerves got to us a little bit and Reeds took

advantage of that and played brilliantly at the end and beat us 13-11 in the shootout to be the

best in Britain! We were happy with our performance though and achieved our goals. Great

weekend and a lot to learn for next time.

Also we want to say thank you to the tennis coaches, especially to Mr James and Mr

Chapman for taking up their time to support and encourage us in Bolton.

Written by Tim Jarvis