It was a cloudy, rainy day in Cambridge, Minnesota, but tennis stops for nothing, and so Logan Miller had a tennis meet in the rain.
Miller was a freshman, and this was his first year playing high school tennis, though he had also played in middle school. On the outside, Logan was a quiet kid, but fiercely competitive. Logan didn’t intend to lose this match, especially given the long drive to Cambridge.
“It took us about an hour and a half to get to Cambridge, so about three hours round trip. When we got there, it was going to start, but then it started to rain so they had to postpone the match. Given the three hour trip, we really didn’t want the meet to be cancelled, so we waited out the rain.”
After about an hour, it stopped raining, so the match could begin. It was a singles match, and Logan was up against a Cambridge kid named Jacob. The first set ended with a win for Jacob, the second a win for Logan.
“I was feeling pretty good going into the third set,” he said, “but at that point the time was getting pretty late, so they decided to end the match with a superbreaker.”
In order to win a superbreaker a player only needs to reach ten points and win by two.
“We started off the set, and it didn’t go very well for me.”
Jacob just kept scoring, over and over, until he had reached nine points while only allowing four points from Logan.
“At that point, it was 9-4,” Miller said, “and so if he scored the next point he won the entire match.”
Miller, who had driven an hour and a half to get there and sat through rain for an hour, did not want to lose this match.
Slowly but surely, he began to eat away at his opponent’s lead.
“I came back to 8-9,” Miller said, “and I served the best serve I’ve ever done.”
At this point, Jacob would still win if he scored this point.
“And somehow he managed to return it. I don’t know how he did it, but he did.”
“At this point I saw that my serve had been back far enough, so that I knew that if the shot I did next was just a little tap over the net, there was no way in heck he could sprint up and hit it back over.”
Logan, adrenalin pumping, knew he had to get this point in order to not lose the match.
“So I tapped it over, the ball hits the white tape on the top of the net, it bounces up…
“And it lands back on my side.”
Logan had lost the match.
