Boys’ tennis: Marshall draws a blank in City quarterfinal loss

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Bud Kling has seen plenty of blowouts in his 31 years coaching tennis at Palisades--most of them administered by his own team.

Yet even he couldn’t recall a playoff match as one-sided as the top-seeded Dolphins’ 29 1/2 to zero shellacking of Marshall in Monday’s quarterfinals.

‘In round robin [scoring] I’m not sure I have,’ said Kling, who has racked up nearly 900 victories and owns more section titles (30) than any coach in City history. ‘You see 7-0 all the time in straight-up matches but it’s really hard to pitch a shutout under this format.’

Not only did the eighth-seeded Barristers fail to earn a single point, they managed just 21 games in 25 sets. In fact, no set was closer than 6-3. Palisades was particularly dominant in singles, surrendering a mere 12 games in 16 sets.

Marshall finished runner-up to second-seeded Eagle Rock in the Northern League and first-year coach Beth Irizarry would like to see #1 play #2 for the City championship.

‘Palisades is awesome,’ she said. ‘If they both make it [to the finals] it’ll be a good matchup. We lost to Eagle Rock 7-0 both times but there were some close sets. We felt like we had more of a chance against them.’

Winning by the widest possible margin was a stark contrast to the Dolphins’ previous playoff match when they lost in the finals last year to Taft by half a point, the thinnest margin possible.

‘Right now, we’re in playoff mode,’ Palisades’ senior captain Jeremy Shore said. ‘You have to take every point seriously. We don’t want to give any team hope that it can beat us.’

-- Steve Galluzzo