Kathryn Wilson hits a shot in a tennis match against Sakurako Watanabe during the Midwest Open 18-and-under Singles Championship at Columbus North High School in Columbus, Ind., Monday, July 24, 2023.
Mike Wolanin | The Republic
The way Kathryn Wilson breezed through the first five rounds and then the first set of the title match in the Midwest Open Girls 18-and-under Championships, she was well on her way to taking the crown.
But in the second set of Monday afternoon’s championship match at Columbus North, Wilson’s opponent came to life. No. 2-seed Sakurako Watanabe, who will be a freshman at University of Cincinnati, rallied for a 2-6, 6-0, (10-6) victory.
After the top-seeded Wilson, a Purdue recruit who will be a senior at North, and Watanabe, an Edgewood, Kentucky, native, split the first four games of the first set, Wilson won four in a row to take the set. But then Watanabe played a near-flawless second set, and points that Wilson had been winning in the first set, Watanabe was capturing.
“Honestly, I just think I was moving a lot better, and I was taking control of the points better in the first set better than in the second set,” Wilson said. “I’ve been playing a lot recently, and I just kind of stepped off the gas a little bit, and I just couldn’t get it going again. The second set was just rough. I was tired. It just wasn’t my day.”
On Monday morning, Wilson rolled to a 6-2, 6-0 win against No. 5-seed Nia Cooper of Chicago. Wilson had won two matches both Saturday and Sunday to advance to the semifinals.
But unlike last month’s high school state singles finals, where she won a morning match, won the first set of her afternoon final and dropped the second set before coming back to win the third and take the title, Wilson was unable to recover in Monday’s third-set supertiebreaker.
“Obviously, this atmosphere is different,” Wilson said. “There’s not as many people. There’s not really cheering, and one of the basics for me is, there’s no coaching in these tournaments, so it’s a lot harder for me to know what I need to do to be better. At state, I could always have (North coach) Kendal (Hammel) be like, ‘You need to do this or that.’”
Wilson said Watanabe was a different style player than the opponents she saw in the high school state tournament.
“Everyone plays differently,” Wilson said. “Styles are different. She was a really good player.”
The Midwest Open was Wilson’s third tournament this summer. She won one match before dropping two in the Clay Court Nationals in Charleston, South Carolina, and made semifinals of the ITA tournament in Indianapolis.
Wilson now will take at least a week break from tennis while she heads to Europe for vacation with her family on Wednesday before returning for the start of school on Aug. 3.
Meanwhile, Columbus’ 32-year run as host of the Midwest Open has come to a close. Hammel has been the tournament director, and Debbie Hendricks has been the tournament referee all 31 years (the 2020 event was canceled because of the COVID pandemic).
“We had a lot of great memories, a lot of players,” Hammel said. “A lot of things have changed over 32 years. This is our farewell tournament.”
