Quote:
Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA
Glad you're returning, selfishly since I'm always entertained by the compare/contrast of Oregon vs Georgia.
The insights about your own coaching journey reminded me of something that was oft discussed about the fairly long tenured coach that was at Will's school for a number of years. His primary responsibility for perennial contender(s) (coached boys & girls), honestly, was making sure transportation was handled on match day. And #2 on his list was determining where the team would eat on the return trip for away matches.
The other thing that stood out to me was the enormous difference in numbers, shockingly so given the ... haphazard? random? whatever word? nature of HS tennis there.
I reviewed my mental math with Will just to be sure: yes, you have more girls each season than the combined boys & girls varsity AND JV at his school. Now granted (if I've done the classification / school size research correctly) you're roughly double the size of his school so it kinda makes sense but even at schools twice your size I don't think they're getting past your numbers.
Sidebar: HS numbers are down in Georgia generally, since the top players rarely play HS tennis (similar to baseball, softball in a lot of places, etc). Less than 1/3rd of the top girls tennis recruits in this 4-year cycles are playing HS, or even attending a traditional HS. They're either in full-time academies or part-time with homeschooling (something I didn't realize until diving into it deeper today and discussing with the kid, etc). And zero of them are in a public HS here.
Anyhow, I'm staying on board for the another lap, looking forward to it.
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I suspect our numbers are compounded by several things 1) we don't have a softball team and 2) it leaves a lot of athletes who are good at other sports, but not college-level (nor club) looking for something to stay busy with in the spring.
Because like your kid's school I presume, it's an expensive private school -- and in our case, the only non-sectarian elite private school in Oregon -- we have a lot of private club kids who grow up around tennis courts by proxy and a bunch of parents who also play, which leads our girls to get coaxed to pick up rackets.
I think it's also quite social for our program, though there's a clear demarcation line between the viably talented kids and the ones that are less so.
I understand the no-cut policy thing in practice, it sounds good for ADs, but in practice they don't support no-cut programs that aren't football/basketball the same way. If tennis had the infrastructure of JV matches (Colorado does this extremely well) that other sports did, you'd be able to keep more kids around.
But tennis is weird because of the whole raft of junior events that one can play from such a young age, that high school tennis is a bizarre exercise for elite kids, unless it's an area that has a lot of talented players all playing HS too.
I laughed at the coach's responsibility bit you mentioned, that's important stuff -- but yeah...with kids that are getting coached, it's a fine line between not wanting to wreck their games. For me, I know my limitations and so I just try to get between the ears of the really good ones and help them stay within themselves and with the non-year round players you have a lot more latitude to help them focus and try to dredge skills that can help.