Giants embrace the grind en route to first-ever state tennis trophy

Highland Park girls tennis’s motto this season was just two words, but they lasted three months.

The words “keep grinding” were as important in August as they were on the very last day of the season, Oct. 17, when the Giants made program history.

“We told them … this is a special team,” Giants coach John Whitehead said. “We can play against anyone. Just go out there and focus on … what we can do on this court.

“I couldn’t be more proud. They just grind and grind and grind.”

What Highland Park did was tally 27 team points in the IHSA Class 2A championships, enough for a second-place finish and the best in Giants tennis (girls or boys) history.

The Giants finished 10 backs back of four-time state champ New Trier and four points ahead of third-place Hinsdale Central (23 points). Wheaton-Warrenville South (22) and Conant (21) rounded out the top five.

Highland Park has pushed entries through to the state finals plenty of times, collecting 15 sectional titles along the way. But the program has never brought home a state trophy (top-three finish) until now. The Giants were 11th in 2025 and their previous best finish was fourth in 2017.

“There is nothing like a team win. I couldn’t be more proud,” Whitehead said.

The “keep grinding” mentality was present all weekend but maybe never so much as when duo Kourtnie Halperin and Julia Batt took on Conant’s Nidhi Karekar and Ella Kestner in the second round on Day 1, Oct. 15.

The teams split the first two sets to enter into a tiebreak that lasted for over an hour with Halperin and Batt emerging with an 18-16 victory.

“There were eight match points. It was very intense,” Halperin said. “… It’s hard because you don’t want to just push the ball but you want to make it in. … You have to decide when to be aggressive and not aggressive, especially when you’ve been playing for two hours before that. We never gave up on each other and stayed positive.”

Halperin was one of three seniors in the Giants state lineup. The other two, Gaby Gold and Aidan Stolze, were paired in the other doubles group and collected the most points of the four Giants entries.

Gold and Stolze won their first three matches before losing in the quarterfinals and entering the backdraw. There, they picked up two more wins before finishing with sixth-place medals.

Whitehead said Gold has built her own legacy following her brother Blake’s state-championship doubles (with Evan Glebov) win in 2023 and Stolze is “a monster at the net.”

“They really work well together,” he said.

Highland Park’s singles entries, sophomore Andie Lawrence and freshman Maya Keller, combined for 12 team points

Lawrence won her first two matches in straight sets before falling to the consolation bracket, where she earned three more wins, including a straight-set victory against Stevenson’s Kylie Blass, a ranked opponent.

Keller also won her first two matches, fighting off Lake Zurich’s Lora Boianov 6-3, 4-6 (10-6) in Round 2. She added one more victory in the backdraw.

Halperin said the Giants may have known they’d be a successful program but just how successful didn’t sink in until the sectional championship, when they topped perennial power Stevenson just a week before state.

“It was just crazy that we made history this year,” she said. “We all wanted to succeed, but we didn’t know how well we were going to do, getting second place to a school (in New Trier) that has over 1,000 more kids than us is a really big accomplishment. And for all of us to make it to the second day was a really big deal too, especially three of four doubles players in their senior year.”

Aside from New Trier and Highland Park, the North Shore’s Deerfield won the 1A team championship for the second straight year. Lake Forest placed fourth. North Shore Country Day’s Evie Drexler was the 1A singles runnerup.

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