[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by Young Drachma

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.

Georgia is a hybrid of that I guess. Regular season region standings determine region tournament bracket, top four from each of the eight regions qualify for state (a total of 32 teams for each of the 8 classifications)

Also, we play both boys & girls in the same season which is also maddening.

We do that as well, not sure I realized that the seasons were ever separated anywhere. Matches are typically girls & boys same day, same location, aside from occasional single-gender opponents (military schools, boarding schools, etc)

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.

I don't know that we've ever drawn anyone because of tennis, as the whole area is chock full of top programs. I believe within 10 miles of each other you have at least 2-3 top 10 teams in their classification (A-Private, AAA and AAAA) for both boys and girls. Expand that by one county in each direction and you get several more.

Around here, it's all about the large number of USTA players, which extends all the way to having 60+ (or whatever their age break is) national champion teams and frequent contenders.

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.

I think a typical varsity roster around here is probably no more than 10 per gender (fits with 3 singles, 2 doubles pair and a little depth) and then JV squads of the same size. A few places with larger enrollment do have enough depth to field a pair of JV squads though.

Coaching is a VERY mixed bag. Our school they're basically irrelevant, most every player on both varsity rosters has had private coaching from about age 5-6. We're on the extreme end of that though, most of the local schools have at least somewhat more involved school coaches, though pretty much all the players at the top schools (public or private) are all privately coached from an early age, with both group and individual instruction. And if you don't have that in Georgia, honestly, you're not usually advancing very far once you get to state tournament play.

A lot of entire regions are one-and-done in the opening round, bagel'ed regularly by more tennis-focused regions. And this year more than ever before, there were a number of first round byes due to a lack of schools in some regions even fielding teams, even in classifications as high as AAAA.

Oregon also doesn't use ad-scoring until the state tournament. Which is also ridiculous, though it does speed stuff up a bit.

And ours is just the opposite I guess. It's still strictly verboten in the state tournament but regular season & region tournaments were given leeway to do as they chose.