The Day’s All-Area Boys’ Tennis Player of the Year: Stonington’s Brady O’Neil
Brady O’Neil got along so well with teammate Tucker Callahan that every time the two faced each other in practice, Stonington High School tennis coach John Adriano had to play the bad guy to generate a little more of a rivalry.
“I had to try to create tension there at times where there wasn’t any because I wanted them to go at each other a little harder,” Adriano said. “Whenever they played a set, whoever won was embarrassed. That’s not good. I had to kind of try to become the enemy a little bit. They weren’t going to become the enemy of each other, that was evident.”
In the end, O’Neil, a sophomore, won the Eastern Connecticut Conference singles championship over Callahan, a senior, 6-3, 4-6, 6-1 in a nearly three-hour match on May 22, an all-brown-and-white-clad epic.
That gave O’Neil the nod over Callahan as The Day’s 2024 All-Area Boys’ Tennis Player of the Year, despite Callahan’s role as Stonington’s No. 1 singles player throughout the season to O’Neil’s No. 2.
But that wasn’t really the end. The minute that match was over, possibly sooner, the two were back on the same page, leading the Bears to their second straight Class S state championship. Stonington finished unbeaten at 19-0 with the ECC Division I title, as well as the state crown.
“We have a really good relationship,” O’Neil said of Callahan. “It was tough to play him in the final. In practice we like to play with each other, rally and hit, but it’s hard to play a match. We had to for the ECC final, but it was all love. It was really good.
“It was a good environment. His parents and my parents both cheered for us. All the people from Stonington either had to clap all the time or none.”
O’Neil was playing in his second straight final, having finished as the runner-up last year when he played at No. 1 for the Bears with Callahan competing at doubles due to an injury.
The 5-foot-11 O’Neil, who also plays for Stonington’s basketball team and will play soccer this fall, describes himself as a “grinder.”
“Very athletic. He’s a hard worker,” said Adriano, who had heard of O’Neil but never saw him play until he arrived at Stonington as a freshman. “Brady really attacks the game, attacks the court. He’s playing his opponent. He’s playing the court. He’s hard on his body. That’s his style of play.
“It’s full-contact tennis. He’s very tenacious.”
“I never had the pop that other players have, the one shot that I’ll always win the point,” O’Neil said. “I’ve always had the conditioning and the endurance. That’s what I’ve been growing up as. My coach told me, ‘make more (shots) than whoever’s on the other side of the net.’”
O’Neil’s affiliation with Stonington High School started long before his own athletic career began. His grandfather, Dave Walsh, was the school’s girls’ soccer coach from the team’s inception in 1994 through 2017, recently inducted into Stonington’s Athletic Hall of Fame with 205 career victories.
O’Neil was the ball boy; his grandmother would pick him up every day at his elementary school and drop O’Neil at girls’ soccer practice.
He played soccer through eighth grade and followed closely the Stonington boys’ soccer teams which won state championships in 2019 and 2021 at Dillon Stadium in Hartford (now Trinity Health Stadium).
“I always thought when I got to high school, it would be pretty cool to play in front of a lot of people,” O’Neil said.
That came to fruition, just not in the sport he was expecting.
O’Neil played in the ECC Division II tournament championship game this year at Mohegan Sun Arena, with the Bears falling to Wheeler in front of a crowd of 4,034. There was also a buzz among the fans at the ECC and Class S tennis tournaments — “it’s an honor to play in front of that many people,” he said.
Walsh still likes to drive O’Neil home after games and matches. O’Neil loves all the sports to which he devotes himself. He’s currently involved in summer league basketball and teaching tennis at Wadawanuck Yacht Club in Stonington, also dabbling in golf with his friends.
He hopes to eventually major in finance or engineering.
O’Neil said Callahan has a better forehand than he does.
“If I leave it short, he’ll pretty much kill me,” O’Neil said.
“It wasn’t just the 1 and 2 playing each other from my team,” Adriano said, going back to the ECC final, “it was the 1 and 2 players from the league, the 1 and 2 players from the ECC this year. Everybody (from Stonington) that got beaten (in the ECC tournament) was beaten by another Stonington player.
“... To win one year, the first title for a team that’s never won a state title, but then to come back the very next year and do it again ... I’m not saying I knew we were going to do that, but I knew who I had coming back. I didn’t think we were going to be worse off.
“It was a good year for us. Go undefeated. ECC. States. The whole nine yards.”
v.fulkerson@theday.com
The Day’s 2024 All-Area Boys’ Tennis Team
Player of the Year - Brady O’Neil (Stonington)
Singles
Tucker Callahan (Stonington)
Sebastian Fieldsend (Ledyard)
Christos Matsas (Waterford)
Jiarui Peng (East Lyme)
Ajay Rana (East Lyme)
Matt Turrisi (Stonington)
Doubles
Morgan Fisher-Nick Sousa (Fitch)
Sam Lund-Chase Donnarummo (Stonington)
Louis Dhervilly-Adam Balfour (Waterford)
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