After reaching the 3.5-4.0-4.5 Tri-Level final last month at Nationals, Shawn Arcaria’s team lost a tough one and headed home. Here’s what Shawn told TennisFortWorth.com about the exciting experience and some of the events that led up to it:

“A few of us are members at Lifetime Fitness in Plano, and we have always had a Tri-level team out of Dallas. This year, the dates did not work well, so we decided to have the team out of Fort Worth. My 4.0 team lost in the final of Sectionals, so I had a couple very good players in Stephen Bennett, Noeh Romero and Mike Glasgow.

“There was a single player on the Dallas wildcard 4.0 team at Sectionals that I wanted for my team, Ryan Delapaz. I am close friends with the captain of the Sectional champs at 4.5 men’s, as well as the Sectional-champ captain for 3.5. I spoke to each, because they each had players I wanted and I needed their help in order for them to play for our team.

“All of these players are very highly recruited, because they are the best at their level. So at 4.5 I was able to get Jason Kern, Jean Nguyen and Johan Mudsam, while at 3.5 I was able to get Eric Gordon, Drew Schultz, Manolo Diaz and Bill Kaiser. Together with my knowledge and the help of some other captains, we put together a team we thought had a chance to make it to Nationals.

“At Nationals we got a very tough flight. Our first match was against the defending champs and a section that wins their flight every year, Southern California. This match was very tight, and the loser was all but eliminated from contention.

“Our 4.5 line of Jean Nguyen/Jason Kern lost their match first. Our 3.5 line of Drew Schultz/Manuel Diaz was winning, so it was going to come down to the 4.0 line. We, Shawn Arcaria/Ryan Delapaz, lost the first set when we were told that whoever won the 4.0 line would win the match. Ryan and I came back to win the second set, and were able to win the third set to give Texas the victory, 2-1.

“Our next match was versus Caribbean (Puerto Rico), who always has good teams in the adult leagues and has won Nationals multiple times in adult nationals. Almost a similar situation as Southern California, except this time the 4.5 line of Jean Nguyen/Jason Kern fought back from a set down to win their match in a third set and give Texas a 2-1 victory.

“In order to win our flight and advance to the semifinals, we needed to beat Eastern, who had already beaten Caribbean and lost a very tight match to Southern Cal. We initially thought they would be the easiest match of our flight, but that was not the case once we saw their previous results. Our 4.5 line of Jean Nguyen/Jason Kern and our 3.5 line of Eric Gordon/Drew Schultz each won their matches, which allowed our 4.0 line to retire because we had advanced to the semifinals.

“They did a blind draw that night for the semifinal matchups, and we received Southern section as an opponent. Our 4.5s lost in a third set, so we needed to sweep the 4.0 and 3.5 lines to advance to the final. The cool part was that we won both matches at the same time. Our 4.0s of Ryan Delapaz/Stephen Bennett won their match, and three seconds later our 3.5s of Drew Schultz and Manuel Diaz won their match to advance us to the final.

“In the final, we ran into a very good team from the Southwest section. Every match was tight, but SW came out on top in all three lines. A lot of drama in our matches as we never had a single easy match. All matches were tough, and the competition was incredible.”