Quote:
Originally Posted by Young Drachma
Wow, okay. Yeah, Colorado does both an individual tournament and then added a team tournament. Obviously Oregon still crowns an individual state champion in singles & doubles and then uses the points from those state tournaments to crown the team champion, so it's possible here to play your own teammate for the state title.
I don't imagine a world where we'd be able to get enough momentum to get rid of the state singles/doubles tournaments, because there are so many schools that aren't competitive in team tennis who use that for their 1 or 2 kids who are good enough to represent the school. I think this is just a vestige of the western states being relatively rural and very spread out.
New Jersey has an individual tournament separate from the team state tournament that happens over two weeks and is like 128+ players or something, but there you can only qualify your top singles & doubles pairing (though occasionally, a school that's deep like newark academy can send another player)
I would actually like it here if we only had 1 singles/1 doubles at state and only the district champs & finalists in the bracket, in 6A that'd be just 16 singles & 16 doubles, in 5A it's be just 8 and 4A we'd only have 10 and the whole thing could be done in a day.
There are instances where unseeded kids run the table, but I don't know of too many situations where a kid finishing 3rd in their District somehow comes back a week and goes on a heater through the whole bracket and wins it all, so no real need to include them.
Needless to say, they haven't put me in charge yet though.
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I wish I was able to shed some light on the elimination of the singles titles (which I think should probably have been called Individual titles, just for clarity lol) but I wasn't really following closely that far back.
Looking at the titles since then, the issues with tennis in the state become pretty obvious.
'95-'00 we had only 4 classifications -- the largest class (4A) won by schools from Gwinnett or Cobb Co (i.e. affluent metro). Of the other 3, 16 of 18 titles were won by private schools.
'01-12 we went to 5 classifications -- largest class 5A all public (no privates IN 5A iirc) - with a rare DeKalb title, and 4 from a Columbus area school. 4A had 9 of 12 winners private, privates won 35 of a possible 36 of the other titles (and the outlier was the uber-affluent Johns Creek which was still new at the time, playing below their eventual size)
'13-'16 we had 7 classifications. Public swept the 2 largest, privates won 11 of the possible 12 titles where they were mingled.
Of our mid-sized classifications, privates have won 34 of the last 38 boys titles, 30 of the last 38 girls titles. The exceptions include local (to me) North Oconee multiple times (the recipient of white flight from Athens) and a 3 year streak by a real outlier in south central GA. Of over 400 publics schools, only a half dozen outside of the 2 largest classes have ever won a title in the past two generations.
And in those mid/small classifications, there aren't even enough schools fielding a tennis team to fill out the 32 team brackets completely with 4 teams per region. (and in recent years, the Atlanta city schools do qualify 4 but typically forfeit their matches rather than compete in the state tournament at all, with the outcome being 99.999% certain).
edit to add for context re: fielding a team -- 3 singles, 2 doubles = team, so 7 players per each boys & girls squad. And it isn't unheard of to see teams competing while giving a walkover in at least #2 doubles