IOWA CITY – Win or lose Saturday at the Class 2A girls state tennis tournament, Cedar Rapids Washington Coach Dan Reyner had decided it was going to be his final match.
After 35 years of coaching, he had wanted to go out on top with a high school championship. He thought this might be the year with the second-best singles player in the state and a solid lineup from top to bottom.
“Any one of our top four girls could probably be the No. 1 player on eight out of 10 teams in Iowa," he said.
The Warriors had finished third last year but came back with experience and a top-flight freshman. With three straight state titles under their belt, Reyner knew the Little Cyclones of Ames were again the ones to beat.
“But,” he said Saturday morning as the team competition got under way, “I think our chances are good.”
The defending champs proved too tough to handle, though, toppling Washington 5-2 in the finals at the University of Iowa tennis center.
As he planned to do, Reyner told his team on the way home from the tournament that he’d coached his last match.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” he said between games Saturday afternoon. “I finally decided just recently that now is the time to go.”
Players saddened by retirement news
Katie Hammond, the team’s top player for four years who finished second in Friday’s state singles competition, said the girls were disappointed and saddened but not totally surprised.
“We had a hunch,” she said. “I wish we could have won it. But we had a really good season. We finished better than last year.
“And our team came together, and we were all very supportive of each other. So I’m happy with the season.”
The coach, too, said he was pleased although he still maintained that a title was within their grasp.
“Ames is a great team,” he said. “But if all of our girls would have played up to their potential, we could have beaten them.
“But, we finished second just as we’d been ranked all season. And that last match was the only one we lost all season.
"So, it was a very good year. And this has been a great group of girls to coach.”
Girls "played tougher" in the finals
The Warriors, the No. 2 seed in the Class 2A state meet, struggled to even get into the finals. After taking a 4-0 lead in singles Saturday morning against Urbandale, they lost their last two singles matches and their first two doubles matches. Hammond and partner Lilly Hartman saved the day by winning their contest in a tie-breaker for a 5-4 victory.
Against Ames, only Rina Moore and Lanie Sabin won their singles matches, just as they’d done against Urbandale. Hammond lost to Jessica King, who had defeated her the day before for the singles championship, but Hammond said she gave it a much better effort.
“I was more relaxed,” she said. “And I used a different strategy. I was more aggressive and went for more shots.”
Taking a 4-2 lead into doubles play, Ames won the title by claiming the first doubles match.
“The girls played well in the finals, much better than they did in the morning,” Reyner said. “They played tougher and pushed Ames to some close matches. Two or three of the singles matches could easily have gone the other way.”
Coach reflects on career
And this time, for the longtime coach anyway, there will be no next time. Now 61, he has retired from teaching science and math at Washington, and his wife, Kathy, has retired as an elementary principal.
They built a home at Lake Delhi just before the 2010 flood, and Reyner has been commuting almost an hour to Cedar Rapids for substitute teaching and coaching.
“That got old,” he said.
So after 12 years as the Warrior head coach, eight before that as the freshman/sophomore coach and 15 at Wilson Middle School, he said it’s time to hang it up.
“I’m going to miss it,” he said. “And I’m going to miss working with the girls.”
Reyner is not one to wax philosophically about his career. But he said he has learned one thing about coaching teenage girls for more than three decades.
“As serious as most of them have been about their tennis,” he said, “I found out early on that with all of them, it takes second place to prom. You don’t mess with their prom.”
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