Last season the Oak Harbor tennis team finished with a 3-13 record in WesCo North matches, but it could be a much different story in 2007.

In his ninth season as head coach, Horace Mells said he has some solid returning players who gained a lot of experience as juniors and sophomores last year.

“We have 20 kids out right now and I need to have about 24 or 25 to be pretty solid with the varsity and junior varsity teams,” Mells said. “I have a couple of kids who said they were going to come out, so we should be all right.”

One of the key veterans is senior Danny Lura, who Mells said will be playing first singles for the Wildcats in 2007.

Other returning seniors are Tyler Abrahamse, Dylan Merritt and Josh Whitley.

“Danny is going to be the top player for us this year,” Mells said. “He has finished his portion of the round-robin varsity challenge and he’ll be the number-one singles player. Tyler, he is going to be number two or number three, that’s something that is still being decided.”

Mells said there is a new player out for the team, Derek Thomas, who is a sophomore and has showed a lot of skill in early-season practice.

“Derek is a good player and he will be either the number two or number three singles,” Mells said. “This is his first time as a varsity player. He worked hard during the off season and he was out here even in the winter practicing, so he will get rewarded for all of his hard work.”

Oak Harbor also has four juniors returning to the roster in Ryan Evans, Paul Jewell, Jordan Kingma and Joel Valles.

Mells said Stanwood and Snohomish are always two of the teams that are up there at the top.

“After that, you have Cascade and Lake Stevens who should be right in there as well,” he said. “Monroe, they have been going strong. We just have to fight hard, train hard, work hard and hopefully we can do better than we did last year.”