Quote:
Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA
Yesterday's recap brought something to mind that I'll ask about:
What measures are in place to prevent (or limit) sandbagging?
It's not something that comes up very often here to my knowledge, but as I understood it, basically coaches could challenge placement of players if they had specific information that pointed to shenanigans. (USTA rankings can be a clear tell if someone gets too crazy with it)
|
Every league in Oregon has a different (or no) rules against stacking. My current league's rule SOPs say that your Top 4 players have to play 1st/2nd singles and 1st doubles every time. On my team there is a clear Top 3, so we wouldn't have any real reason to stack ever, but since those Top 2 only play select matches, it ends up being a bit more variable for us.
You're supposed to have a challenge ladder setup so if someone asks, you can indicate a player is really in the spot on the ladder that you say in the lineup. But it's not like New Jersey where I grew up that has a whole formal process/form for listing your lineup and stuff.
Honestly, the 4/4 situation makes stacking pretty hard even at the 6A level where I used to coach because most teams aren't deep enough to really stack heavily so even if you stack a team a bit lower than they ought to be, you're probably concedeing a match elsewhere in the lineup.
Since regular season games don't matter & there's no team tournament the incentives to stack here aren't really significant. The district tournament (singles/doubles( determines who goes to state, the state tournament (singles/doubles) decides the state champ based on points for advancing, meaning bad schools with one or two good players can win state if it lines up right.
Which drives me bonkers. 4A(3A/2A/1A) tennis is kind of boring, most of the time and I wish tennis was just single class, but they're not going to fix that, the scheduling, the seasons or anything else because the ADs control it and none of them give a shit about tennis or how it's structured.