The District 11 Singles Championship was a rematch from last season, but provided some new drama as top seed Andrew Sinai of Freedom downed Emmaus' Matt FitzMaurice 6-3, 6-4 to capture his second-straight district title.

Sinai seemed to struggle a little early on, but eventually got his feet under him and started to play a stronger game at Lehigh University.

"It's in front of a bunch of people, so that's never easy and I'm used to playing at West End and I've only played here once or twice and these courts are really different, they're faster and it feels like there's not enough air in here. I started feeling sick myself," reported Sinai.

After FitzMaurice took the first game of the second set, the Emmaus sophomore suffered a hamstring injury and took a medical timeout to get his leg wrapped. Before play could resume, FitzMaurice used a second medical time-out because of nauseousness and was obviously slowed for a short time because of both the injury and the illness. Eventually, both players got back to the battle that they were waging prior to the timeouts.

"I was just hoping he wasn't going to pull out, because we were having a good match," said Sinai. "I wasn't at the top of my game, but he was playing really well, so I felt like we were pretty evenly matched today and I wanted to keep playing."

The two players are friends off the court, but Sinai admitted that he wasn't going to let their friendship stop him from taking advantage of the situation. Sinai's strategy became one of making FitzMaurice run the court as much as possible and the strategy, which FitzMaurice admitted he would have used, too, worked.

"Heck, yeah. Friends or not friends, he was going to be moving," laughed Sinai.

Both players had some struggles with first serves and looked to take advantage of those issues, but Sinai thought the service problems weren't where the match was decided. Instead, he focused on the rally battles in the match and winning those battles as a strategy to winning the match.

"I felt like I could have played better and could have gotten a lot more first serves in," said Sinai. "I feel like the serves didn't impact the match that much. It was more in the rallies. I felt like in the beginning I was having trouble returning his serve, but then I got into a groove and got stronger mentally."

Sinai is obviously happy with having captured two straight titles, but he's got bigger fish to fry as he battles to improve over his third place finish at states last season.

"I want to win states. That's all I want to do," said a determined Sinai. "I do feel stronger. Last year I finished third and all I wanted to do was improve over last year and I think I'll do that."

The PIAA Tournament begins May 23 in Hershey.