Category: Cate WTN Tournament Series

2026 Cate Fall Junior WTN Tournament Recap

More than 60 matches were played over the weekend, across boys and girls singles and doubles. The tournament was played under much cooler, overcast conditions than the heat wave of the previous week.

On Saturday, play featured the boys early rounds, with 12 players advancing to the second day of play via their round robin wins. Additionally, the girls singles round-robin tournament was held, with Cate Spring Junior WTN winner Elly Edwards going back-to-back to win her second title of the series. Kiki Chang collected the finalist trophy in her first participation.

Sunday morning saw the start of doubles match-play on dry courts and more partly-cloudy weather. The 20 doubles participants each competed in 3 matches, with a number of close sets played throughout the events.

In boys’ doubles, the finals was played between Nico Holve/Braden Stewart and Kakeru Hirofuji/James He. The pair of Holve and Stewart claimed top honors with a 6-4 win, with Hirofuji/He finishing runner-up and Alex Danely/Massey Scott taking the third place match.

Girls’ doubles featured close first-round matches, with Kiki Chang/Kiki Danely defeating Adhya Reddy-Hoelle/Taylor Dannemiller 6-4 and Lotte and Margo Nicholas squeezing past Riya Mitera/Kaisa Taggart 7-6 (3). The Kikis would go on to sweep their remaining matches to claim the girls’ doubles title, with Reddy-Hoelle and Dannemiller taking 2nd place.

In the boys’ single-elimination tournament on Sunday afternoon, after several rounds of play, Kakeru Hirofuji booked his ticket to the finals with a 6-1 win over Alex Danely. On the other side of the draw, Braden Stewart took an upset win over Diego Morales (6-3) to make it two finals in one day.

Hirofuji and Stewart took the court at 3:30pm, 6.5hrs after they had each started the day in doubles play, but the match was not to be a long one. Despite some excellent points in the early going, Stewart began to struggle with cramping and the physical play of Hirofuji proved to strong a challenge. At 3-1 for Hirofuji, the match ended in retirement.

The win for Kakeru Hirofuji marks his second singles title in the three-part Cate Junior WTN Series for 2026, with Hirofuji also taking the inaugural edition back in January. Stewart improved on his Round of 16 finish in May during the spring edition for a 2nd place finish in the fall edition.

Here’s the link to the 2026 Cate Fall Junior WTN Tournament for a deeper look at the draws.

Also during the weekend, Brendan Gordon received some Toroline string after being recognized by his peers for excellent sportsmanship throughout the tournament.

The Sunday pizza party was joined by another fun event called the “One-Point Ram Slam.” The event pitted tournament participants against each other in a single-elimination draw where each round is won with just a single point played. In the Australian Open version of the event, 32 players competed for a $1m Aussie prize, but as we don’t have Aussie currency here, the winner was playing for the title “Ram Slam Champion” and a $50 gift card to Lucky Llama Coffee House.

Ezra Oklu, Kiki Chang, Ryder Eberz, and Oliver Tande came through their first-round matches against Roshan Deshpande, Lotte Nicholas, Tyler Spaulding, and Ryland Montgomery (respectively) for a place in the semifinals. Ezra Oklu then forced an error from aggressive baseliner Kiki Chang, while Oliver Tande similar picked up an win through consistency over Ryder Eberz.

In the final, Tande deferred the serve to Oklu, who selected the shady side and produce a powerful body-serve that handcuffed Tande (who had already withstood a booming serve from Montgomery in the quarterfinal match). With Tande’s return clipping the net and falling back, Oklu, the youngest player in the tournament emerged as the first Cate School Ram Slam Champion and winner of the Lucky Llama gift card. Tande took solace in the runner-up award, a fresh set of Toroline string.

A big thank you to the many players and parents who made the 2026 Cate Junior WTN Series a blast to host. Also, appreciation needs to be directed at Cate School for being the event facility and to SB Tennis Patrons for partnering as a tournament organizer.

Keep an eye out for the 2027 Cate Junior WTN Series in January, May, and October of next year where we hope to see you all (and your friends, and their doubles partners) on the courts for some more fun tennis competition.

Cate Spring Junior WTN Recap

More than 40 high school (and future high school) players competed in the Cate Spring Junior WTN Tournament over the weekend, with some local names featuring in each of the three finals matches.

In Girls’ Singles, Cate School sophomore Elly Edwards took the title over finalist Adhya Reddy-Hoelle with an emphatic 6-0 victory. The win in the single-elimination playoff avenged her tie-break loss to Reddy-Hoelle in the Group Stage of the girls draw, held earlier in the day. 

Photos of Elly Edwards taken by Ben Elkin

Cate has now claimed the girls’ singles title in both editions of the 2026 series, with Edwards’ fellow sophomore Cate teammate, Jade Wang, taking the winter title.

Boys’ Doubles was nearly an all-Cate affair in the winter event, with 3-of-4 players in the final able to walk across campus from their dorm rooms for the tournament. This time around, it was 2 teams from San Marcos High School and 2 from Viewpoint in Calabasas who battled for the final 4 positions in the doubles compass draw.

In the end, it was Levi Reece and Jacob Cantrell from SMHS who took the title over Viewpoint’s Vance Resnick and Gavin Holmes. The San Marcos team battled back from 0-3 and 2-5 down in a determined fashion to claim the title, winning the final 5 games for an exciting 7-5 finish. 

Meanwhile, on the next court over, their high school teammates Paolo Borgioli and Eliot Gray nabbed third place from Jonah Windisch and Casey Bernstein of Viewpoint. Cate’s top doubles performance came from sophomore/freshman duo Alex Danely/Nolan Hsing, who battled back from a first round loss to take 5th place.

Singles play for the 32-player boys’ draw began on Saturday with players competing in 8 grouping of 4 players, round robin-style. The group stage yielded 16 players for the Sunday afternoon single-elimination playoff. 

Amongst those who advanced were 3 middle school entrants who all kept the high school boys on their toes throughout the tournament. In the Round-of-16, Ryder Eberz battled to 4-6 against the top seed, Harry Pedersen went 5-7 against the #10 seed, and Tyler Spaulding also managed to play some great points against the eventual champion.

Elsewhere in the draw, Oliver Tande took a pair of wins and defeated the #3-seeded Gavin Holmes en-route to a semifinal showing. The Laguna Blanca junior went one better than his performance in the winter edition, where he also defeated a #3-seeded player to reach the quarterfinal round, before falling to eventual champion Kakeru Hirofuji (Cate).

The other semifinalist was Jonah Windisch, who matched his semifinals performance in morning doubles competition. Windisch took a 6-4 victory over Cate junior James He and another 6-4 win over Nicholas Christman, a junior at Atascadero High School.

Photos of Nicholas Christman and Lucas Forry taken by Griffin Gruber

With top-seeded junior Lucas Forry of Santa Barbara High School and #2-seed Vance Resnick of Viewpoint reaching his second final of the day, the battle for the title was sure to be a thriller. 

The set featured very close competition, with neither player able to pull out a significant lead. At 4-4, Forry broke Resnick, earning a chance to serve the match out, but Resnick fought off a set point to continue the back-and-forth affair. Eventually, the two found themselves locked in a tie-breaker to decide the title. Even then, the two lefties stayed close in the early-going, trading blows both from the baseline and at net. Finally, Resnick managed to close out the match 7-4 by winning the final 3 points to take the championship and finish the weekend 7-0 in singles play.

As a tournament director, I was honored to have such an outstanding group of boys and girls tennis players competing across the weekend. The competition was fierce, exciting, and enthusiastic and we had great representation from a variety of coastal California players from Atascadero to Malibu. 

I also want to take the opportunity to again recognize our 5 Sportsmanship Award winners, who helped save the day Sunday morning when we had a wet court delay; Vance Resnick, Gavin Holmes, Jonah Windisch, Ryder Eberz, and Harry Pedersen all earned $25 Tenniswarehouse gift cards when they showed up early and volunteered to help push puddles and get the courts dry so the morning matches could get on court. 

While we had some great examples of sportsmanship during the matches, I think it’s important this time to recognize these guys for their proactiveness in helping. A core element of sportsmanship is doing the right thing or making the extra effort to be kind, even when it might not seem like anyone is watching. The mentality of being a good sport should extend beyond the match, to the school or club, where inevitably it can also then become a part of who we are outside the tennis world, too. Thanks guys!

The spring edition of the Cate WTN Tournament Series is round two of a three-part series, which will conclude with a fall edition on October 10-11. I look forward to seeing many familiar faces and hopefully some new additions to the mix in the fall.

Trevor Thorpe – Tournament Director