MUNCIE — After Monday’s win over Pendleton Heights, Mt. Vernon head coach Gabe Muterspaugh preached the importance of the upcoming match against Delta.
To his memory, it had been since 2009 that the Marauders last defeated the Eagles in a girls tennis match.
That date didn’t sit right with him though, so he went back and looked through all of his old scorebooks.
He discovered that it had been much longer than 15 years.
In fact, he believes it had never happened in his 28 years at the helm of the Mt. Vernon program.
That was until Wednesday.
On the road, and on an extremely windy night, No. 13 Mt. Vernon defeated No. 22 Delta 4-1 to take control of the Hoosier Heritage Conference traveling trophy that the Eagles have held for 13 straight seasons.
“Huge, huge, huge,” Muterspaugh said about the win. “I don’t know if we’ve ever won here, and I was going back through my books and I’m not sure if we’ve beat them ever. It’s huge for us, it’s huge for our program and our whole culture. We have four freshmen in our JV lineup that are like, we can do this every year now. It just solidifies what I’ve been talking about all year that I think we’re a top 10 to 15 team in the state. Delta is a perennial all-state program, so for us to beat them at their place and to win 4-1 it just shows what kind of team that we have.”
Coming into the match, Muterspaugh knew the Marauders had a legitimate chance to win, but with such a deep team, the lineup he would go with to make that happen kept him up at night.
He even brought three different lineup sheets with him to the match.
The one he settled on was a lineup the 5-0 Marauders had yet to use this season and one that returned an all-state singles player to the top spot in the lineup.
A member of the No. 1 doubles team along with Ava Lusby so far this season, Kylie Brandes — the team’s No. 1 singles player last season — moved back to that spot. That pushed Caroline Allen down to No. 2 and Ginni Morelli to No. 3. The team’s usual No. 3 singles player, Maria Downs, was left out of the lineup.
“I was thinking about it all night last night, and my gut just kept telling me that the biggest mistake we could make was just doing the same history over and over and over again. We knew what they had coming back and I thought, you know what, we have three all-state singles girls, and Kylie’s beaten this girl the past few years, so let’s just roll them out,” Muterspaugh said. “Maria, who is the best teammate in the world, was like, ‘I get it. Let’s go win.’”
As envisioned, the Marauders swept the three singles matches, but it was the No. 2 doubles team of Sophie Maxwell and Addison Lockwood that made the match stress-free.
To get Mt. Vernon the first point of the night, they defeated Rowan Hinds and Alexa Bratton 6-0, 6-3.
“For Sophie and Addie to come out and win the first set 6-0, set the tone early, and get off the court first, that was huge,” Muterspaugh said. “Then I knew we were really sitting pretty.”
With one of the three points needed out of the way, the Marauders two new additions to this year’s roster secured the win.
Morelli, an Italian foreign exchange student, was the second off the court with a 6-0, 6-2 win over Brylee Beckley at No. 3 singles, and Allen, a move-in from Brownsburg, sealed the victory with a 6-3, 6-0 win at No. 2 singles.
“Ginni and Caroline are just absolute bulldogs … She doesn’t know any of these people, so she’s just going out and playing her tennis,” Muterspaugh said. “Caroline doesn’t show a lot of emotion … She’s so long and sometimes you forget that she’s just a sophomore because she is so composed on the court.”
Brandes put the exclamation point on the win with a 6-2, 6-3 win over Gabby Knight.
At No. 1 doubles, the new duo of Lockwood and Carmen Lugo fell 6-0, 6-3 to Delta’s all-state pair of Katie Manor and Kelsey Vest.
“You go up and down the lineup and we’ve got seniors in very big spots. Ava and Carmen are playing an all-state doubles team in their first match together this year, and I thought they played great,” Muterspaugh said. “Overall, I’m just really proud of all the girls.”
Although still early in the season, the Marauders are undefeated, have won the Center Grove Trojan Classic, won all five flights of the Mt. Vernon Invite, and now hold control of their own destiny in the HHC for the first time in a while.
The Marauders busy week continues with another conference match on the road against county rival Greenfield-Central at 5:30 p.m. Thursday.
