West Iron boys tennis wins third straight U.P. championship

West Iron County’s boys tennis team finished a rare run of sustained excellence with a third straight Upper Peninsula championship, and it did it the hard way in Kingsford. The Wykons piled up 46 points to top Ishpeming’s 28, with Iron Mountain third at 20, Gwinn fourth at 12 and Munising fifth at 0, cementing a season that had been building toward one goal from the start.

The championship day was anything but routine. The finals were played in sunny, 85-degree conditions, and West Iron still had to navigate a weather interruption before closing the door on the field. The Wykons won seven of eight flights, and three of the finals needed a tiebreaker in at least one set. Two matches went the full three sets, including the ones at No. 1 singles and No. 2 singles, where Dominick Brunswick and Donte White had to grind through the kind of pressure that often decides a title meet.

Brunswick outlasted Iron Mountain’s Malakai Broersma in three sets for the No. 1 singles championship, while White beat Iron Mountain’s Seth Greenleaf in three sets at No. 2 singles. That depth mattered as much as the headline wins. West Iron did not need one player to carry the load in Kingsford. It had steady results across the lineup, and the finals score showed how the program’s balance separated it from the rest of the field.

Coach Jim Anderson said the three-peat had been a goal all season, and the route to the championship backed that up. On April 14, Anderson said 18 boys had been coming to practice as the Wykons pushed toward the difficult task of a third straight title. West Iron also sharpened its edge before the finals with 8-0 wins over Gwinn on May 7 and Ishpeming on May 11, a stretch that left Ishpeming as the last Division 2 hurdle before the finals.

For Iron County, the title run is bigger than one afternoon in Kingsford. In a community where high school sports are part of the county’s shared identity, a third straight U.P. championship gives West Iron County another marker of stability, discipline and player development. Brunswick, White and the rest of the lineup turned a season-long target into a program-defining stretch, and the Wykons now stand among the most successful boys tennis teams in recent school history.