Mounds View’s Soren Swenson wins Class 2A boys tennis singles title; St. Paul Academy sweeps in 1A

Mounds View sophomore Soren Swenson stepped onto the court wearing his white “MV Tennis” T-shirt and green shorts. But he added something else: a bright blue “Nerf” branded headband. It’s the same one his older brother, Bjorn Swenson, wore when he won a pair of singles state titles in 2019 and 2021.

“Well, first of all, it’s my headband,” Soren Swenson said. “I got it at a fourth-grade birthday party, and it’s just, it’s powerful. It makes me win.”

Swenson’s ability to dictate play with his lefty forehand might have something to do with it, too. He won the Class 2A boys tennis singles championship with a 6-2, 6-4 victory over Aaron Beduhn, a Wayzata senior who also finished as the runner-up last year, on Friday afternoon at Baseline Tennis Center on the University of Minnesota campus.

The match was closer than the set scores indicated, with seven deuce games. Swenson, with a “one point at a time” mentality, fed off deficits within games, too. He fought off nine of 11 break points, and he erased 0-30 leads six times to get right back in the game.

Swenson has done well with momentum shifts, said Mounds View coach Scott Sundstrom.

“Then when the momentum’s away from him, stealing it back and getting it on his side, and not letting the scoreboard influence him,” Sundstrom said.

Swenson earned his first hold of the match when he came back from 15-40, using a couple of winners at the net to take the game. He followed that with his first break of the match, clawing back from love-40. He could have easily been down a break at 3-0 to start, but instead he used his powerful ground strokes mixed in with a volley to grab a 2-1 lead.

Beduhn finally capitalized on a couple of break chances to make it 4-4 in the second set, but Swenson broke right back. He closed out the match with four consecutive points, including one in which he clobbered three consecutive overheads until he finally got the winner. Swenson added an ace that hit 111 mph on the radar board to get to match point and close it out.

“A lot of relief because two points before the end, I was hitting a couple overheads in an insane point, and my legs started to cramp, and I was like, ‘Oh no,’ ” Swenson said. “I was glad it’s done.”

The two have faced each other multiple times, including in the team semifinals earlier this week. Beduhn won that meeting in a third-set tiebreaker, 7-6 (1), 4-6, 10-5. That was Swenson’s only loss of the season.

“I wish I could’ve switched the times,” Beduhn said. “I would’ve taken the loss in the team one, where we would’ve still won. What can you do?

“He just played better than me today.”

Bjorn Swenson, who just finished his junior season playing tennis at Michigan, won state singles titles as a freshman and junior. (The pandemic wiped out the tournament his sophomore season.) Watching his younger brother complete the same task Friday was “amazing” for the elder Swenson, one of four brothers.

“Words can’t describe, to be honest,” Bjorn said. “I almost feel more happy for him than when I won it. To get to see one of your brothers do that well, it’s pretty special.”

Orono won the doubles championship, Anthony Perrill and Quinn Martini defeating the top-seeded pair of Jacob Salisbury and Rishi Ranjith of Wayzata 6-2, 7-6 (1). It was a rematch of sorts of last year, when Salisbury and his then-senior partner Tanay Panguluri defeated Perrill and Martini in the final.

Soren Swenson’s twin brother, Anders, and doubles partner Max Daigle took fourth place as an unseeded duo, losing in three sets to Eden Prairie.

St. Paul Academy freshman Winston Arvidson stepped into the Reed-Sweatt Family Tennis Center in a familiar position Friday morning: as the No. 1 seed in the Class 1A individual singles tournament.

“It’s always a different atmosphere here at state,” Arvidson said. “You definitely feel a bit more nervous, you feel the crowd.”

Last spring, when he was in eighth grade, Arvidson also held the event’s top seed, but he fell to teammate Zahir Hassan in the championship match. Arvidson said that experience proved invaluable throughout the season, providing extra fuel and a higher comfort level late in the tournament.

Arvidson booked a return trip to the final round with a dominant semifinal victory. There, he knocked off No. 3 seed Evan Ritter of Rochester Lourdes 6-1, 6-1 to capture the crown.

“It’s a great privilege to be a state champion,” Arvidson said. “There are only two of them in the state, Class 1A and Class 2A. It’s just an awesome thing to do.”

Sporting pink KT Tape on his right knee — an accessory he said was purely decorative — Arvidson didn’t drop a single set in tournament play.

Just one court over, teammates Isaak Senaratna and Allan Wang racked up gold medals of their own, giving SPA a sweep of the individual singles and doubles titles for the second year in a row. This came two days after the Spartans secured their fourth consecutive 1A team championship.

In doubles, an all-SPA final pitted the top-seeded duo of Jacob Colton and Ben Macedo against No. 2 team Senaratna and Wang. Colton and Macedo, senior captains for the Spartans, defeated their younger counterparts in two previous meetings this spring. This time, Senaratna and Wang took a 3-0 lead in the opening set and pulled off a 6-3, 6-4 victory.

“Going into it, [I had] low expectations because we’d lost [to them] before,” Wang said. “After we won, my emotions are up in the air right now. I’m so happy we got the opportunity to play in the finals and actually beat the No. 1 seed.”

After he and Senaratna finished third in last season’s state tournament, Wang said he was nervous during Friday’s semifinal round. Once they reached the championship, it was like any other tennis match for the pair who first trained together at ages 7 and 8.

“It’s the best feeling, the best possible outcome of a season,” Senaratna said. “I know we got the team [championship] as well, but this one means something different. We were here last year [and] we barely missed out on the final.”