On the tennis courts at Germantown Academy, the host Patriots and the visiting Blue Devils of Springside Chestnut Hill Academy made their 2026 Inter-Ac League debut last week. SCH picked up a win at fourth doubles, but GA won all of the other flights to emerge with a 6-1 team victory.

Both teams are under familiar leadership this fall, with Jon Freeman returning as head coach for the Patriots, and Drew Silverman for the Blue Devils.

SCH graduated its top singles players from the 2025 team; Leah Thomas is now playing for Howard University, and Ella Brown is on the team at The College of New Jersey.

This year’s GA number one, junior Zoe Brownstein, was already an All- Inter-Ac First Team selection in 2025. She won the first singles match on Sept. 15 by a score of 6-2, 6-0 over Blue Devils freshman Taelyn Gray. Another Patriots junior, Jessica Ma, needed just one more game than that to wrap up the third singles bout, winning 6-3, 6-0 against visiting sophomore Simone Weiss.

The outcome at second singles would not be decided until much later on.

The doubles scores were considerably closer than those for first and third singles. In the first flight, Germantown Academy senior Lexi Tsirelson joined up with freshman Eliana Leorda-Bejan to take on freshman Sophie Smith and junior Alyssa Brown of the Blue Devils. The Springsiders ground out a 7-5 victory in the first set, but the host twosome secured the second at 6-1 and then prevailed, 10-8, in a tiebreaker played instead of a full third set.

Springside Chestnut Hill’s lone match victory came at fourth doubles, where senior Quinn Clotman and sophomore Maryn Delp won a pair of 6-4 sets from Patriots sophomore Maya Hearth and junior Liz Farma.

At second doubles, SCH junior Lily Vakil and senior Leela Gilbert-Gokhale won the first set, 7-5. The match was split when GA senior Angie Li and sophomore Angela Yang took the second set at 6-4; then Li and Yang clinched a victory by taking the tiebreaker, 10-3.

In the third flight, the first set ended in a 7-5 tiebreaker that produced a favorable 7-6 outcome for Blue Devils sophomore Malley Bradenham and senior Izzy Dupree. A 6-4 win in the second set for junior Anna Petersohn and sophomore Talia Taylor evened things up, and a 10-3 tiebreaker gave the match to the Patriot pair.

Many extended rallies kept the second singles bout on the court for quite a long time as two juniors slugged it out. Germantown’s Erica Liang won, 6-4, over SCH’s Riley Zlotkin in the first set. Then the tally reached 6-6 in the second set before Liang captured the deciding tiebreaker, 7-5.