Bowdoin Athletic Hall of Honor
STEPHEN SULLIVAN ’11 & OSCAR PENA ’12
Each an extraordinarily accomplished tennis player, together Oscar Pena and Stephen Sullivan formed an incomparable doubles team that reached the pinnacle of the sport for the first time in the history of the Bowdoin tennis program.
Both achieved remarkable success over four years at Bowdoin, leading the men’s tennis teams to NCAA tournament appearances three times each. Sullivan was an NCAA national semifinalist and quarterfinalist in men’s singles and led the team to the NESCAC Championship in 2008 and remains in the top five in Bowdoin men’s tennis history for career doubles wins and in the top ten for career singles wins. Pena was an NCAA national runner-up in doubles and remains in Bowdoin’s top ten all time for doubles wins in a season. Each was selected as an NCAA Division III All-American three times. But it was as a partnership that the duo achieved their most historic success.
In the 2011 NCAA Division III men’s tennis tournament, the pair rolled through the doubles bracket, capping the run with a straight-set victory over a team from Claremont-Mudd-Scripps, the hosts of the tournament, to capture Bowdoin’s first-ever national title in tennis. The groundbreaking triumph was a victory that brought the Polar Bear men’s tennis program to a previously unseen level of success and paved the way for sustained excellence and multiple future national titles.
