WARSAW — A smile, a wry one at that, summed up the matchup Tuesday between county tennis rivals.

Roger Brady needed exactly three seconds into the postgame interview to overview the 5-0 loss his Wawasee team took to Warsaw. A match that lasted approximately 70 minutes and going pretty much to script.

“We knew what was going to happen before it started,” Brady ushered in his opening statement. “The biggest thing was I told the kids, you come in with respect, you leave with respect. It’s how you handle yourselves and how you play.”

Brady further mentioned of trying to beat Goliath, in this case a Warsaw team that sits at 5-0 in the Northern Lakes Conference and is positioning itself for a Sept. 17 showdown with also undefeated Concord in the NLC. The showdown, which still has matches for both clubs in between including a Concord matchup at rival Northridge this Thursday, is nonetheless on Warsaw’s radar.

“I’m stressing a lot of focus in practices, because we have lost focus this year in matches,” said Warsaw head coach Rick Orban. “We have won conference matches 3-2 that we should have won 5-0.

“We have NorthWood on Thursday. There again, we should win that, but tomorrow’s practice will all be about focus, focus, focus. Then Friday’s practice will be directly to get ready for Concord and the matchups we will likely have up there.”

As for the play on Tuesday, Warsaw upheld Orban’s wishes to remain focused. The two singles court had Evan Miller completely roll past Todd Hauser 6-0, 6-0 in a very quick matchup. The two doubles duo of Will Petro and Connor Singrey also made very quick work of Roz Kunkle and Doug Hapner, love and love.

The doubles tandem, after losing their first match of the year over the weekend, came back with a vengeance.

“I really liked what they did tonight,” Orban said of his two doubles team. “We had a couple matches recently where we were really flat and we didn’t attack the net and weren’t aggressive. We worked really hard the last week to get that turned around. I was really impressed with what they did tonight.

“We talked about it, it is real easy to just sit back and hit from the baseline against a team like this,” continued Orban. “You probably still win. But if you do that, it becomes a bad habit and we are trying to break that before Concord.”

Alek Jansen made it official on the three singles court, beating Chase Myers one and love while the one doubles team of AJ Herendeen and Sam Rice needed a little more time, but posted an identical score over Isaac Rigdon and Dylan Houser.

Warsaw’s feather in the cap came in the remaining one singles court, where a struggling Kyle Wettschurack held off a fine second set from Kyler Love. Wettschurack won the first set, 6-2, but traded games with Love in the second set. Sitting at 5-4, Wettschurack battled through, getting a very nice win heading into the final week of NLC play.

“These are the matches, they don’t scare you but they make you a little bit nervous,” Orban said. “You should win it. You know you should win it. You should win it easily. You know you should win it easily. But if you don’t stay focused, it can come back to bite you. Those things have happened in the past.”

For Wawasee, now 1-12 on the year and 0-5 in the NLC, its back to the drawing board with home matches against Memorial and NorthWood before the conference tournament begins next week.

“What we’re worried about right now is just forehand and backhands,” admitted Brady. “Just now, I just talked to (Myers) for the first time since we started to talk strategy. Right now I’m talking strategy with a varsity player. Those other things, we don’t worry about.”