Monomoy Girls Tennis Starts Year With Two Sweeps

HARWICH – Only last year, Monomoy girls tennis head coach Bill Burke said the team’s group of singles players was probably the strongest he’d ever had in his 10 years with the program.

 This season, that notion has carried over and, even more, become further fortified. The Sharks, who reached the Division 4 quarterfinals last year (for the second consecutive season) with just one senior in their lineup, can again expect to be a dominant team, again with just a single senior on the roster. 

The Sharks opened their 2026 slate with a 5-0 home sweep against Bourne on March 31, then won 5-0 Monday against Nantucket. 

“I'm very pleased with the whole team,” Burke said after the season-opening match. “We're a little stronger than last year for sure. We've got new players that came in and have added to what we already had from last year. We made it to the Elite Eight last year, so we're hoping for a repeat of that, if not better, from the group.”

Against Bourne, junior Hanadi Rezk defeated senior Lily Russell 6-1, 6-2 in first singles. Freshman Ella Cutter defeated senior Ainsley Hopwood 6-2, 6-2 in second singles. And eighth grader Alexa Spirito defeated senior Zoe Noonan 6-0, 6-0 in third singles. 

“When you haven't played a match in a while, it's hard to get back in the rhythm of things, so I think it was a good starting match, and I had fun,” Cutter said. 

In first doubles, junior Darcy Addison and senior Madison Mahfouz defeated seniors Sofia Halunen and Ella Swierkowski 6-2, 6-2. In second doubles, sophomore Olivia Rezk and junior Momoka Akatsuka defeated sophomores Arianna McCarthy and Sofia O’Neil 6-2, 6-0.

 When Burke highlighted the group of singles players last spring as probably Monomoy’s strongest ever in the past decade, he was referring to Rezk, Cutter and Addison. Against Bourne, Spirito slotted into the third singles spot, but the Sharks’ order of play certainly isn’t set in stone, and they clearly have a greater number of capable singles players than the three spots available per match.

 To that end, the motto of the team — a 20-strong group — is “you just get better every day at practice, use the matches to improve and get more experience,” Burke said.

 “There's going to be some competitive challenge matches internally to decide the final top lineup,” Burke said. “But yeah, I'll put our singles against anybody in the league and beyond, really.”

 Monomoy’s dominant one-two punch remains unchanged from last season in Rezk and Cutter, who now have even more experience. The singles lineup is the “backbone to our matches,” Cutter said, a corps that can rely on each other to come through.

 “I feel like my mental game has gotten a little bit stronger just playing in front of my teammates and in front of other people and just learning how to play against people who sometimes are great competitors and sometimes they're not,” Cutter said.

 Spirito’s shutout versus Bourne was the first win of her high school career (in her first-ever match). For that, she received a ball signed by the rest of the team post-game.

 “She is a great addition to the team,” Burke said. “Very strong player.”

 She wasn’t the only Shark to receive a signed ball after the season opener. Akatsuka, an exchange student from Japan, also earned the same token for her first win in an American high school match. Rituals like that play into the teambuilding that Burke has emphasized on multiple occasions despite tennis naturally splitting players up into mostly individual contests.

 “They really support one another, and that's one of the things I put a lot of value on, is the team concept, and everyone's supporting each other, even though it's an individual sport,” Burke said.

That sentiment, to be sure, is shared by players, too. Cutter said the team was “so excited” for the year and “very together.”

 “I think we're all just excited to go through the season, not only having fun during matches but having fun during practices and just being a team together,” she said.