TL;DR: We won our final match yesterday against the Catholic school we beat at the start of the season, this time blanking them with our emergent junior (And soon to be top seed at district singles) leading the way.
We finish 9-0 and win our league title. The district tournament -- a misnomer, as it's the same teams in our league -- is next Wednesday and Thursday. I'll be disappointed if we don't win both the singles and doubles titles, as it'll take a major upset for it not to happen. Not being cocky, it's just having seen the whole league there isn't anybody really that can take the teams.
The doubles one is actually more of a debate than singles, because that defending state team we beat a few weeks ago isn't facing our 1-2 punch, but rather, the 2-3 players on our squad, but I still think as long as they can play well together, the firepower will be too much for them to overcome. (senior state semi-finalist in doubles, and a state singles semi-finalist two years ago)
Singles, it better be our true no 1 singles player and the emergent junior who has been our day-to-day no 1, since the other one is training and playing in junior tournies, most of the time this year (since there's no state tournament, again.)
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Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA
If you covered this already I'll just have to admit that it didn't stick and instead I'll just ask:
How much action outside of HS tennis do your players get? I remember the one girl (the "can't play indoors mom says") seeming like a regular year round kind of player but I'm unclear about the rest of them.
The distinction is what I wanted to ask about: how much difference to you see in the mental games of the 12-month devoted players vs the play-during-HS-season-mostly players?
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I didn't cover it at all. I only have 3 real tennis players who like...take lessons regularly and would be solid college players. Two of them are fringe D1 players already as HS juniors, the last one would held a D3 team that's not in the Top 25.
The rest are just athletic kids who either had lessons in the past and haven't played in a while and generally play other sports. (I have a decent number of volleyball players and one of my seniors plays basketball)
One of the reasons I think we'd struggle if we were playing a 6A schedule night and night out have more tennis players on their rosters who can hang and work themselves out of jams. That said, it's not an issue for us playing 4A tennis where having 2 elite players and 2 very good ones is more than most teams have by far.
The mental toughness question is a good one. My elite players aren't going to panic ever because no one is good enough to beat them until the state tournament in our league. My 3rd best player who has been a state semi-finalist in doubles her freshman year doesn't play singles precisely because of the mental stuff, she kind of cracks under pressure.
So for my squad, I'd say the 12-month-a year tennis players are easier to work with because you can talk tennis with them and give them lots of information to process and they just have to execute it.
The rest of them, you're mostly speaking in parables and having to stop flaws a lot because just do stuff regular tennis players wouldn't do (shot selection, how they can be one-dimensional at times....) and when they get into jams, it can be difficult to dig them out mentally because they just don't have as much experience with the skills to be able to adapt on the fly.
It makes prepping coaching plans kinda difficult -- for me -- because I have to try to keep everyone engaged, and it's partially why I let the elite players (sans one who just likes being at practice) to skip most practices and just work with their own coaches, so it leaves me with the rest of them. Assuming I do this again next season, I'm going to see if I can't hire a 2nd coach to work on tactics with them.
The JV coach I have now is experienced as a soccer coach and understands tennis just fine...but I think we'd benefit from a 3rd coach who was focused on varsity to help me out.