Heartland Christian's Cooper Grim won the Div. II state tennis singles championship on Friday at the Lindner Family Tennis Center in Mason. (Photo courtesy of Cooper Grim)

MASON — Columbiana County has its first state tennis champion.

Heartland Christian junior Cooper Grim won two matches on Friday at the Lindner Family Tennis Center to win the Div. II state singles championship.

After a marathon 7-5, 6-7, 6-1 win over Pepper Pike Orange junior Ilya Shcherbakov in the semifinal, the East Palestine resident returned to the court to best Milton Union junior 6-3, 6-1 Levi Brumbaugh in the final.

Brumbaugh came into the final well rested after the No. 1 ranked freshman in Ohio Harrison Lessard of Columbus Bexley retired in the first set with the score 5-2 in favor of Brumbaugh in the other semifinal.

“Today was just an absolute grind of a day,” Grim said. “I had to stay tough mentally in the semifinal. It was a three and a half hour match. I was up 4-1 in the second set and he ended up coming back to take the set. It was mentally tiring as well. I had to regroup to be able to pull out that third set.”

Grim said he has played Shcherbakov four official times over the course of his career. They practice against each other at least two times a week at the Cleveland Racquet Club.

“We’ve gotten each other a lot better,” Grim said.

Grim said he had no concerns about Brumbaugh having had an easy time in his semifinal.

“I was feeling really tired after the semifinal match but by the time the championship came adrenaline just got me through,” Grim said. “I knew I had to be really disciplined coming out and forget about the fact that I had a really long match before. It’s a state championship and both of us really wanted it bad. I knew I had one more match left and just had to leave it all out there.”

The two Div. II semifinals featured some of the highest ranked players in Ohio. Grim came into the day as the seventh ranked junior in Ohio bu the Tennis Recruiting Network. Shcherbakov is ranked as the sixth best junior in the state while Brumbaugh was ninth.

The previous best showing of a Columbiana County tennis player at the state tournament was his mother and coach Michelle, then McMillen of East Palestine, who lost to Cincinnati Indian Hill’s Andrea Farly 6-3, 6-1 in the 1988 Class A-AA state championship match. Farly, who won four straight singles titles, went on to be a junior singles finalist at the 1988 French Open. Farly reached a career-high ranking of 118 in the world.

“(My mom) is a lot better than me as far as our tennis careers are concerned pretty much in every single aspect,” Cooper Grim said. “It’s nice to finally get something where I get to one up her. She’ll be hearing about it for a long time.”

Cooper Grim’s final started at 1:26 p.m. and lasted under two hours. His final was the last one to finish on the day in which four state titles were handed out.

The Div. II doubles champions were Indian Hill’s Neelan Chandi and Gareth Kurowski. Greg Bernadsky of Mason was the Div. I singles champion and Cincinnati St. Xavier’s Carson Dwyer and Nihal Narisetty won the Div. I doubles title.