By Martin Cleary
Zhenya Kondratovski has seen it all in more than three decades of service with the on-and-off-and-on-again University of Ottawa Gee-Gees tennis program.
After experiencing the lean years early on, a collapse of the program for 17 years and a return to competitive tennis with a slow rebuilding process, the Gee-Gees hit their highest point at the 2025 Ontario University Athletics championships, which could trigger significant financial gains down the road.
For the first time in OUA tennis championship history, the Gee-Gees earned a medal at the provincial university finals last weekend in Markham.
The Gee-Gees captured the men’s silver medal. But if they had converted one of their singles losses to a win, they would be wearing gold medals as the champions. The second-seeded University of Toronto Varsity Blues edged the Gee-Gees 4-3 in the final.
Ottawa entered the OUA championships as the No. 8 seed in the season-ending, eight-school tournament. The seeding was based on the results from the previous year’s provincial championships.
The Gee-Gees had an amazing start by winning all three doubles matches to gain the one and only team point. The teams of Alex Lungu and Vlad Pirusca, Filip Popadich and Aidan Biss Mantziounis and Will Adamson and Mathew Shenk-Pare were in control, winning their matches by respective scores of 8-5, 8-4 and 8-1 over their Varsity Blues opponents.
The six singles matches decided the top two positions and the Varsity Blues managed four wins for the decisive four team points, while the Gee-Gees’ two victories left them with three overall team points.
Pirusca, who won the National Capital Tennis Association men’s singles title in 2023 and 2024, defeated Rassam Yazdi, a fifth-year Varsity Blues player and five-time OUA all-star from Ottawa, 6-1, 7-6 (8). Adamson, a first-year player with high-level national junior experience, outlasted Eric Ma 4-6, 6-3, 6-0.
The Varsity Blues received their singles points from Lucas Mock, who defeated Lungu 6-2, 7-5, Ben Whitley, who turned back Popadich 7-6 (4), 6-0, Alex Zhang, who is from Ottawa, beat Waldman 6-3, 6-0, and Luka Kirigin, who held off Shenk-Pare 6-3, 6-4.
“This year was a bit of a Cinderella story – unheralded Gee-Gees men’s team beats national champions (University of) Western Mustangs (in the semifinals) and goes to the OUA 2025 final,” Kondratovski said in a phone interview this week.
The Gee-Gees reached the final by upsetting defending OUA champion Western 4-3 on the strength of four singles victories in the semifinals, after sidelining the University of Waterloo Warriors 6-1 in the quarterfinals.
“This was a result of years of shaping that vision, setting goals, failing, succeeding,” he added. “All the hard work by succession teams of our execs and team leadership and coaches and so many good players that helped and contributed to build the team structure.
“Fast forward to 2025, we now have a talent pool on both the men’s and women’s sides, some valuable experience and track records, and building our confidence over time, playing exhibition matches against very established programs like Western, U. of T., York, McMaster, Brock, Guelph, Laval, Concordia, ETS and Waterloo.”
While the Gee-Gees women’s team didn’t reach the medal podium, it did win one of its three matches to finish sixth – a program-best.
The No. 8-seeded women’s team of Andrea Dimitrev, Marian Tran, Laurence Laporte, Sophia Dimitrova, Jenna Jenkins, Sophia Gonzalez and Francesca Nitica lost to top-seeded University of Toronto 7-0 in the quarterfinal, defeated McMaster University Marauders 3-2 in the consolation semifinals, but lost the consolation final (for fifth and sixth place) 4-1 to Waterloo.
When Kondratovski, a four-time NCTA men’s singles champion, was a student at the University of Ottawa, he played two years (1993 and 1994) for the Gee-Gees. He then transitioned to an assistant coach in 1995 and 1996 before becoming head coach in 1997.
But the university’s athletic department shut down the tennis program in 1998 as it wasn’t a national-level sport, there was no women’s program and it wasn’t reaching the administration’s expectations.
Sixteen years after the tennis team folded, student interest revived the program and Kondratovski returned as head coach to begin the long, slow process of building respectability and success.
For seven years, beginning in 2014, the Gee-Gees played exhibition matches against Ontario and Quebec university teams, developed team structure, social media platforms, memberships, alumni engagement and sponsorships.
Former Gee-Gees football player Patrice Aubriot helped the team with “his guidance, persistence and dedication” to achieve varsity club status and a berth in the OUA league, according to Kondratovski.
By 2022, the athletic department put the tennis program on probation for one season. One of the highlights for the Gee-Gees was for the men’s and women’s team to qualify for the OUA championships. Both teams lost in the first round to the powerful Varsity Blues.
For the past three seasons, the tennis program has been a varsity club team under the Gee-Gees’ sports structure, receiving about $3,000 a year to cover its five-week schedule. The players also contribute more than $600 each to pay for various team fees. They also don’t play any home matches because there are only 18 indoor courts in Ottawa and it’s difficult to get sufficient court time to stage a two-day competition.
In 2023, the Gee-Gees again lost in the first round of the OUA championships, but 2024 was different at least for the men’s team, which placed a best-ever fifth by winning two matches in the newly introduced consolation round.
Last year, the tennis program took a major step by hiring a personal trainer at the High Performance Centre to work with the players in the off-season.
Everything came together this season unlike any other. Besides the men’s team winning the OUA silver medal and the women finishing sixth, their overall improvement was recognized with several awards.
Pirusca and Lungu were selected to the OUA all-star team and Kondratovski was named the conference’s coach of the year. During the two-day OUA championships, the Gee-Gees’ social media platforms had more than 130,000 views.
Five athletes also were honoured for their academic work in 2024-25 by achieving an 8.0 grade-point average or higher – Pirusca, Noor Nabaa, Mathis Doyon (the co-president of the team), Anna Turner and Estefania Zaragoza Pedroza.
Kondratovski is hoping the success on and off the courts this season will earn them a promotion to being a varsity club tier 2 program, which would increase their funding from the university to $25,000.
“It did not happen overnight; took a decade to build a program,” Kondratovski explained. “We needed to get recognized by the university and secure varsity club status and that changed a lot of how we started to approach the process, view ourselves and create that incentive and motivation to do well as a group and a team.
“Now, we have tasted real success, finals of the OUA, and that positions our team in the top pack of a very solid league. Amazing run. We got respect, feeling that we belong there and got noticed. Now, we need to keep working harder to earn the right to be there, improve our depth and ability to perform under pressure, which requires a lot of mental discipline and focus, keep getting better, keep growing and take a more holistic approach to training and playing.”
By training, travelling and dining together, the men’s and women’s teams created a special energy, passion and camaraderie to work towards one goal.
“The men’s team looked very strong with our top three players back from last year,” Kondratovski added. “We picked up national-calibre junior Will Adamson, Aidan Biss Mantziounis and Matt Shenk-Pare and that solidified our roster.
“I had a feeling we had a shot at the finals, if not the Cup. (Our) goal was to finish in the top three. We also picked up two strong women players – Laurence Laporte and Sofia Gonzalez.”
The Gee-Gees’ two tennis teams also benefited from the positivity, dedication and commitment of assistant coaches Ramin Anam, Luka David and Dylan Crimmins.
“I feel very blessed and lucky to have them and it certainly helps with so many matches (and) players,” Kondratovski continued. “All of us in the OUA are volunteer coaches. This is something we love and believe in doing and that creates that special camaraderie.
“At the end of the day, it’s always about the players. We are like shepherds, mentors and cheerleaders trying to support, guide and encourage them.
“You need to believe in your players and our team as you are only as good as they are. People first, athletes second. It’s a journey really, not a destination.”
Martin Cleary has written about amateur sports for over 53 years. A past Canadian sportswriter of the year and Ottawa Sports Awards Lifetime Achievement in Sport Media honouree, Martin retired from full-time work at the Ottawa Citizen in 2012, but continued to write a bi-weekly “High Achievers” column for the Citizen/Sun.
When the pandemic struck, Martin created the High Achievers “Stay-Safe Edition” to provide some positive news during tough times, via his Twitter account at first and now here at OttawaSportsPages.ca.
Martin can be reached by e-mail at martincleary51@gmail.com and on Twitter @martincleary.