Any hopes that Emmaus had for continuing its season in the PIAA Tournament ended when Matt FitzMaurice and Sanket Narayana fell to Liberty’s Luke Conrad and Dan Lynn in the District 11 Doubles Semifinals, losing in three sets.

After losing the first set 6-3, Emmaus battled to even up the match with a 7-6 (7-3) win in the middle set.

Conrad and Lynn regrouped and won a hotly contested third set 7-5 to advance to the finals, where they were upended by Ross Sonnenblick and Aidan Bodeo-Lomicky, who advanced to states with the win.

Emmaus not only reached the semifinals in doubles, but FitzMaurice reached the finals in singles play before falling to Parkland’s Nick Kshatri.

In team play, Emmaus also reached the semifinals before falling to Parkland 5-0.

“I thought we did well,” said coach Dimitri Diamandopoulos. “We knew we were strong coming in and it was just a matter of playing hard and playing up to our level and we did that.

“We had a couple of tough losses in districts, but we battled and came up just short in singles and doubles.”

Of the 27 players on the roster for the season, the Hornets will lose 14 of them to graduation, including their top three singles players, FitzMaurice, Narayana and Cam Widdoss.

In doubles, Emmaus will lose John Gurrieri, Zooey He, Brett Miller, Steve Naab, Darsh Patel, Collin Riegel, Cory Ross, Dylan Spain and Dan Traynor.

Filling those holes will be difficult, but the added number of players who made the team this season will give Diamandopoulos the opportunity to find some players capable of stepping up.

“We were able to keep so many players because they have some talent,” said Diamandopoulos. “We have five kids who were juniors this season and will have a chance to step up and there’s underclassmen who have talent and saw some court time for us this year, which will help them.

“A lot depends on what these guys do during the summer to prepare for next year, and how well they develop their game.”

Emmaus finished the season 11-2 in the EPC and 12-2 overall. Their two losses came in back-to-back meets against Nazareth (14-1, 12-1) and Parkland (12-0, 12-1). The Trojans advanced to states not only in singles, but also in team play.