Quote:
Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA
Well I'll be paying attention, cause (for better or worse, mostly worse) I do have some familiarity with the niche, parentally at least.
A few things jumped out at me in this introduction, at least one of which I gotta comment on
Umm ... what in name of Margaret Court is THAT? EIGHT?
Georgia is a 3 singles / 2 doubles format for HS and somewhat rarely do all the matches even finish (which would kinda screw with your tiebreaker stuff).
The biggest controversy in HS tennis in some years here has been arguments about whether to play best of 3 sets (with 7 or 10 point tiebreak for third set only) OR whether to skip third sets entirely and go straight to tiebreak. Otherwise, honestly, I thought our format was kinda the normal standard (tho I've heard of some best of 7 match stuff in a surrounding state or two)
But ... EIGHT? Who came up with THAT?
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Side note here, just cause I figure it'll register with you more than most.
My kid's HS was/is a powerhouse, perennial state final four boys and often likewise for the girls. But the boys? They just wrapped up their THIRTY FOURTH consecutive region title. 13 state titles in that stretch, including 8 in a row (97-04), though the last came back in 2009.
Easy to figure "private school outside of Atlanta" BUT the streak has endured across numerous region realignments, multi-class "area" organization, public/private mixed, private-only alignments, and the coming & going of multiple other state contending programs (including Buford & Wesleyan) being part of the region. No matter what, they've just kept winning region titles. (And I think that's been done under at least 5 different coaches, who often contributed little to the success, mostly filling the role of coaching in the paperwork / driving the bus / making sure everybody gets fed & watered sense)
Much like you mentioned, classification doesn't matter much in terms of competitiveness when rosters are this small. Their best regular season opponents are drawn from the ranks of schools 4x-8x their size.
Sorry for the sidebar but I thought the length of the streak might resonate with you.
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I remembered your son played HS tennis back in the day, so happy you chimed in.
Yeah, I played in NJ and all of the northeast states play 3 singles/2 doubles. Apparently even in Washington state just above us, they play 2 singles/3 doubles which is still better than the 4/4 model. I coached in Colorado where they also do 4/4, but at least there, regular season games actually mean something.
In Oregon, the state tournament qualification is borne purely from the district tournament. It's a single bracket for your whole conference (district) and the Top 4 in singles/ doubles qualify from each league. It means non-talented kids from small areas qualify and get destroyed and good players in deep districts do not get to ever play at state. It's absurd and I wrote a whole proposal to fix it, but the state association doesn't seem to care about tennis enough.
Also, we play both boys & girls in the same season which is also maddening. Wyoming and Idaho do this too but those states it makes sense because of the weather, it's not an issue here truly. And the whole thing sucks and I might keep coaching just so I can raise enough hell to fix it, because tennis kids here get the short end of the stick, largely because the state association doesn't understand the sport.
That win streak is crazy! I think the nice thing about tennis on the east coast is schools eventually become magnets for tennis players and so you get more kids who'll play for a school. Also, the competition is so much better. Even at bad schools in Jersey, you'd see extremely raw players on teams that were decent. I think smaller teams made that work better, whereas with us here, the talent disparities are extremely jarring school to school. And there's not even any real recruiting or anything, it's just talent pipelines. Our main rival is also a private school, of course. Though a 5A school that came to 4A two years ago were the last to win state the year we were last finalists.
The difference between east coast tennis and west coast tennis outside California is huge though. The lack of depth and the absurdity of the format compound the problem. The expanded rosters thing, I think is purely an artifact of 'keeping more kids involved' which I can appreciate, but also...most programs don't have more than 2 coaches, maybe 3 with a JV coach. Whereas even at a small Colorado (private) school we had 5 or 6 coaches across Varsity, Varsity 2 and JV.
Also: on the tiebreaker 3rd set controversy. We do utilize that option but only in matches where the result has already been decided (like we won or lost) just to save time. Last week, had a 4th doubles match gone to a 3rd set, I believe we'd have used it because it was already past 730 and the match would've been decided by the 3rd set either way, so better to have just finished it that way.
Oregon also doesn't use ad-scoring until the state tournament. Which is also ridiculous, though it does speed stuff up a bit.