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Old 04-20-2021, 03:27 PM   #1
Young Drachma
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Join Date: Apr 2001
Sweat Socks: RL HS Coaching Tennis Dynasty

After boring IRL friends with my travails as a high school tennis coach, I figured I'd just make a dynasty so I could document this very abbreviated season into the ether. If nothing else, surely this is the first time anyone has written about coaching high school tennis in this forum.

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My brief tennis background

Being beyond a perpetual dynasty thread starter, Godfather of Fast-sim (tm), and fan of the underdog, I've been playing tennis since I was 9. I was absolutely a late bloomer who was fortunate to have a patient coach. I had mostly group lessons, never private ones.

Anyway, by high school I ended up being a really useful cog in a well-oiled machine. My freshman year we were kind of terrible, but after that the team reeled off 3 straight state tournament appearances and won our conference (for the first time ever) during my senior year.

Over four years, I made 72 varsity appearances which isn't shabby almost entirely at doubles.

After the Air Force, I played one year of college tennis at a D3 school in Illinois that was rebooting tennis after a long hiatus. The timing was good, playing both singles and doubles in all of our matches. At the conference tournament, I made the quarterfinals surprisingly.


Player becomes coach

In high school, I sort became a player-manager as the 6th-7th player on varsity most of the time. I kept the books and could always tell my better teammates who the opponent was if we'd played them before and if they beat them. They really appreciated it over time.

Mostly I admired my HS coach, a black man who was born in 1921 and picked up tennis in his 50s. He built the entire program from scratch and developed us into a perennial contender, as well as sending tons of players to college that way. Had our school had a better reputation, more kids who lived in town would've played HS for us and we'd have surely won at least one state title.

We were truly stacked. There was a summer team circuit of sorts that we played in the 90s that pitted us against other towns. It was the time when all of the local kids came together and played regardless of our schools. The year we did it between my junior and senior year was absurd. We didn't lose the entire summer and blew out anyone and everyone we played.

Anyway, I was a big fan of my HS coach and worked to get our HS courts named after him before he retired, since it's what he said he wanted.

When I had the chance to coach tennis, I took it. First at a bunch of camps around the country. In 2008, I worked at a university doing my real job but I asked the new tennis coach (who was a basketball coach) if he wanted help in the form of a free assistant. He took me up on it.

So I spent a season as a D3 assistant tennis coach. Over the years, I had a few opportunities to coach D3 teams as a head coach or assistant, but the money is terrible and I always felt torn giving up my real career for it, so I never did it.

I coached JV tennis at a prep school in Colorado a year after that, it was the first time I'd coached girls. Previously, I'd only ever coached boys teams. There I coached boys, then they asked me to come back and coach girls. It was actually rewarding. One of my HS boys who started at JV later won the state tournament in doubles two years after I left.

After my last high school job in 2011 and a subsequent camp summer, I didn't coach a school team again until I moved to Oregon in 2018. On a bit of a whim, a 3-time state champ needed a girls coach after their coach retired. I threw my hat in and interviewed a lot better than they expected. They hired a teacher instead, but I ended up latched onto a boys program in the same conference that season.

I lucked into a German exchange student and a team of hungry seniors who would come to practice early and stay late. It would've been better if our best player hadn't been ineligible, but still with two solid varsity players and a roster of hard workers, we finished 5th in our extremely tough 6A (Top division) league and all of our teams advanced out of the first round of the league tournament.

I knew graduating all those kids -- and not getting paid, the school didn't fund tennis -- I wasn't likely to return to that program. So when a job opened up taking over the state finalists at a 4A school (It's a 3A school, but tennis is single class after 5A) I jumped at it.

After the canceled season, back again
Last year was canceled after just 2 weeks. It gave me enough time to get to know the girls, but that's about it. This year, I brought back our 3 best players (only one is a senior) and I knew we'd be good.

Turns out, we had about 5 sophomores who were tennis experienced -- but lapsed -- show up for practice this year and so, now we're a pretty deep team of raw but really good players.

Oregon inexplicably does 4 singles and 4 doubles for matches in high school. I hate it, along with the format that they use to determine state champions. Each match is worth 1 point, most points wins the dual match. If you tie, the tiebreaker is sets, then total games.

We're a private school team that would be good even if we were playing 6A tennis. I don't know that they've ever had a stretch with this much talent and it's a bummer to miss two state tournaments (last year and this one) because I think we've been robbed of at least one state title, if not two.

Speaking of state titles, our girls have won 5 titles in history. (1980, 1993, 1994, 2015, 2016) and were state finalists the last time there was a state tourney in 2019.

2021 SEASON

The goal this year is two-pronged: 1) Win the league (and district are the same thing) regular season title 2) Win the league tournament (Which is dumb there won't be a state tournament)

We're also hoping to play at least 1 or 2 matches against some 6A schools to see where we measure up against some of the best state. We might have a game against the defending 6A champs or at least, one of the Top 5 teams in that classification. We're still see if we get the games added.

I'll do regular season recaps after each match. We play on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This season is unusually short, we're only going to play 9 regular season games (normally we'd have up to 16) and then the district tournament will happen.


Last edited by Young Drachma : 04-01-2022 at 01:22 AM.
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