In a fit of hilarity, I wondered what it'd be like to coach a fall team. So the folks who know I once lived in Wyoming for years...well I came back to coach there. I had a work reason to come back for a few weeks, but mostly, it's a super short tennis season -- 5 weeks in total -- and I ended up taking over the state's winningest tennis program.
The quirks are plentiful:
Quote:
- The format is 5 matches (2 singles / 3 doubles)
- You coach boys & girls at the same time, they travel together but play separate matches (there's no mixed doubles like Texas)
- Regular season only impacts Regionals seeding. Regionals positioning impacts state seeding. Everyone goes to state, only 16 schools in the state play tennis
- It's a flighted state tournament, so there is a team champion for boys & girls and then there are 8 individual state champions (1/2 singles 1/2/3 doubles) every year too.
- The state tournament is double elimination for everyone, so once you lose, you get worked back into the bracket for another matches depending on where you lost (even semi-finalists losers play it out for 3rd place, but there's no 5th place match.)
- State Team Title is based on where you finished in each flight's bracket.
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Naturally, there are absurdly long road trips and we have 3 instances where we play 2 matches on a Saturday against far-away schools.
Regionals are a 5 hour drive and state is in the northeast corner of the state and what's worse is, they split it among 4 different sites meaning you might have a kid playing for a title somewhere and you can't physically be in two places at once. It's bananas.
I have one assistant coach, in theory, I'll get another one in time for the post-season. There's a ton of parent support for the program -- I think at least 70 people showed up for the season opener including parents from the other school -- and needless to say, this was very weird to me having coached in Oregon (or even playing D3 or NJ HS tennis) where you might get a handful of people attending games.
We won our season opener against one of the other local high schools, this weekend we get both Casper schools, their main HS are the defending state champions. The boys team is diminished and have already lost once this year, their girls team are still firing on all cylinders as they only lost their best player.
Our team only has 3 varsity returners on the boys side that finished 7th in the state last year, the girls team brought back just two players from a team that finished 3rd last year after a run of 4 straight state titles.
I am the 3rd head coach in 3 years though (much like I was in Oregon) so that's made things interesting. The sheer number of kids and the fact that I have to also coach JV here is also for sure way different than Oregon and so it's a lot of trial by firehose for the pre-season.
Lastly, it's wild because the boys team players 5 through 12 are basically all able to beat up on each other at any given time. So running challenges between them is tough because you end up in a situation where you only know they can win a singles match, but not sure if they're a solid doubles pairing. So I'm trying to speed up the process of getting a 3rd doubles pairing over there.
Same deal on the girls side, though they're not nearly as deep after their 10th player, so it's a bit simpler for me to figure out.
A far cry from Oregon where the kids mostly trusted me to make the lineup and after a few games of making pretty bad ones, I got my bearings and we won 22 straight. Here way more people are invested in what I'm doing with the lineups, ladders and so forth. It's pretty exhausting and I can understand why they've had a hard time keeping coaches, because it's just a lot of really supportive folks who are also super invested, but it's kind of difficult to suss out.
If the girls finish anything less than 2nd, it'll be disappointing to me. I think they're still figuring themselves out, but if I can unlock the self belief and they start playing well on a roll through Regionals, we'll be in good shape.
I think the boys just getting on the podium at all (Top 4) would be a coup, this team hasn't won a state title since 2018 and the girls have mostly been the standard bearers for the program over the last decade, even though the boys still have one more state title (17) than the girls do (16), I really think it's doable.
For context, the girls lost 3 times last year and the boys only lost twice. The format of having the Regional tournament being high-stakes I think gets in their heads and how stuff gets a little weird for them. I feel like that's where my coaching really shines, but I'll need them to buy what I'm selling if that's going to work out and it's still too early for me to tell whether they do or not.
Prepping practices is kind of impossible and like I'm still doing my real job during all this, so needless to say...I probably should've found a better mid-life crisis outlet. Jokes aside, it's generally made me a better coach already because the Oregon crew really bought into what I was selling and this year it did not take us long at all to get right into things.
But this crew will never miss matches, I don't have to convince anyone to come to practice and it feels way more like coaching a "real sport" than tennis has ever felt anywhere else I've been.
I'll probably check in again in a few weeks rather than do the game-by-game style we did for Oregon, mostly because this situation is a lot more fluid and I'll have a better story to tell after the next week of matches (2 this weekend, 2 next week)