Liberty’s Louis Gruber and David Lynn were crowned District XI Class 3A Doubles Tennis Champions after winning their match against Nazareth’s Gabe Knowles and Nate Tauber, 6-2, 6-0, last Thursday at Lehigh University.

“It feels good knowing that, coming into this, we weren’t necessarily the favorites, but we knew as long as we were playing well and working well together, we knew we had a really good opportunity and we did that,” said Gruber.

The Hurricanes trailed the Blue Eagles only once, and that was early in the first set.

“It feels great. I’m really happy with how we played today,” said Lynn. “The funny thing was I actually played against my brother [Dan] and Louis last year with Luke Conrad. I sort of knew what the environment in the match was going to be like so I think I came prepared to play my best game.”

Lynn, a lefty, served first.

“Most righties aren’t used to seeing how lefties play and how their shots affect them. For example, I used my slice serve on the ad side several times out wide, and I think that threw them off sometimes, so there’s certain benefits of a lefty and righty combination,” Lynn said.

The second set included consecutive deuce games won by the Hurricanes.

“I think the key to those is staying mentally tough, staying calm and relaxed,” said Gruber. “When our serves are on, we can be really aggressive at the net.”

In addition, Gruber, Lynn, Knowles, and Tauber have known each other for some time.

“I actually think it was nice because we’re all from the same club and so it took a lot of the pressure off. It was like playing two good friends. We played really loose, and that was our mentality through the match, staying relaxed and calm,” Gruber said.

Liberty tennis coach Leo Schnalzer presented gold medals to the pair, who will compete in the PIAA State Class 3A Doubles Tennis Tournament next week.

“I didn’t have too much to say between sets, but I said you guys are hot. Things are going well,” said Schnalzer. “They’re great friends outside of tennis. All four of them are great sportsmen. Their court presence is a lesson for a lot of players: how they support each other on the court, how they handle a missed shot, how they communicate with each other. The court coverage was great, the fact that they got to those balls, and of course, their net play was really super.”

The Hurricanes reached last week’s final after defeating Parkland’s Alex Son and Ryan Guzman, 6-2, 6-4, in the semifinal.

“The first set we played really well. We were really solid from the baseline; good, aggressive serving,” said Gruber. “The second set, we let them poach a little more because we didn’t have enough pace on our ground strokes and we didn’t get much depth on our serves, but we did a nice job staying calm and knowing we were up 5-4, and David was serving on that game, and he gave us four really good serves in a row.”