As if on cue, bad weather returned just in time to postpone the first day of the East Penn Conference Tennis Tournament last Friday at Parkland High School.

The early morning rain moved the tournament's opening rounds to Saturday, when players worked their way through matches to get the semifinal round in each of the six brackets. The semis, finals and consolation matches will be played at a later date, which is still undetermined.

Parkland's Nick Kshatri make it to the semis at No. 1 singles as the No. 2 seed. Kshatri will face a familiar opponent in Emmaus' Matt FitzMaurice when the tournament resumes. At No. 3 singles, Jesse Hance had to step in for Peter Harrison, who was unable to attend the tournament. Hance, who was the 10th seed, won his first match before losing to Liberty's Julian Mark in the quarterfinal round.

Doubles saw all three Parkland duos seed first in their brackets and all three Trojan doubles pairs got through to the semifinals. Aneesh Kapoor and Alex Wu beat teams from Whitehall and Freedom to advance, while Kishan Unjia and Nick Hawk downed teams from Pleasant Valley and Easton.

In No. 4 doubles, Alex Son and Peter Son picked up wins over doubles teams from Northampton and Emmaus. Parkland teams will face duos from Nazareth in No. 2 doubles, Liberty in number-three doubles and Central Catholic in No. 4 doubles in the semifinal round.

The easiest run of the day came for Nick Lyman, the top seed in No. 2 singles. Lyman downed Ian Miller of Allen 8-4 in his first and only match of the day. Both players who would have played to face Lyman in the quarters defaulted because they were taking ACT tests, leaving Lyman with a pass to the semis after beating Miller. Lyman will next face Danny Procaccino of Stroudsburg when the tournament resumes.

"I feel pretty good," said Lyman. "I thought that I played well. I'm feeling confident about my game, but I started off a little bit slow and I dropped a game, but other than that, I thought I played great."

Lyman spent the rest of the day cheering on his teammates as they fought their way through matches. Between now and when the tournament resumes, Lyman will have the chance to play in regular season matches and in the District 11 singles tournament, where he comes in seeded eighth. Those matches will provide strong enough competition to have Lyman ready to return to battle for gold in the conference tournament. Lyman isn't one to shy away from competition and would have liked to be on the court for another battle in the EPC Tournament.

"It helps with the confidence and taking that step up from the level of players, because I'll jump from a little bit lower right into the higher tier of players, but also, it's a win. A win is a win and it's nice to have that in the bag," said Lyman.

In district play, Kshatri comes in seeded second, Lyman is eighth and Harrison comes in unseeded. The quarters and semis of districts will be played Friday at Saucon Valley High School, with the finals set for Monday at Lehigh University.