Sunday marked the first banner day of the 2022-23 OUA season, with medal round matches at the OUA Tennis championships at Mayfair Club East in Markham, Ont.
The day kicked off with the women's bronze medal match. That pitted the McMaster Marauders against the Waterloo Warriors. McMaster was able to take the point from the doubles portion, taking two out of three matches. The clincher came courtesy of Mena Shaheed and Gauri Porwal, who took down Savanna Cornfield and Lauren Jutlah 8-4.
McMaster then swept the six singles matches, despite a couple of close scores. Audrey Yeung won the bronze-medal-clinching match for McMaster, as she defeated Vanessa Seto 6-0, 6-3. McMaster then took the next two matches to defeat the Warriors 7-0 en route to the bronze.
Next on the docket was the men's bronze medal match between the host York Lions and the Waterloo Warriors. It was the Lions eking out a 4-3 win to earn the third-place finish. The Lions took two of three doubles matches, including an 8-7 win by Maxim Tokarev and David Gauberg over Pavle Milic and Alex Oancea. Things were neck and neck in singles play, with the sixth and final match of the day proving decisive. York's Christian Giusto outlasted Waterloo's Rick Zhang 3-6, 6-4, 6-1 to put the hosts on the podium.
Then it was onto the gold medal matches for all the marbles and a chance to be called OUA champions. Both championships featured the two OUA tennis powerhouses in recent years, the Western Mustangs and Toronto Varsity Blues. On the women's side, Toronto was gunning for its third consecutive title.
That quest got off to a good start, as the Blues swept the doubles portion of the match to earn a point and go up 1-0. The singles games, however, were a different story. Lauryn Son defeated Pia Jhatttu 7-6, 6-4 to give her team its first point of singles play. Three games later, Carley Citron bested Andrea Kuntjoro in a spirited duel, 7-5, 7-6, to clinch Western's first women's gold since 2018.
The grand finale, the men's gold medal match, was just that – grand. Western was playing for a fourth straight OUA championship banner, but Toronto was going to make them work for it. Victories from the pairings of Eric Chernly/Alex Luchak and Michael Chu/Kevin Wong put Toronto up 1-0 heading into singles. There, much like in the women's gold medal match, Western took over. Three straight convincing Mustang wins from Ashton Cross, Ray Xie and Aidan Zia put the Blues on the brink, and after Luchak kept Toronto alive, 6-0, 6-1 over Lawson Cross, Ethan Milavsky won the sixth and decisive game in a three-set thriller, 6-4, 5-7, 7-5. That clinched that fourth straight gold for Western, also their fifth in six years.
