Quote:
Originally Posted by thealmighty
Hopefully the teams are really good. You don't get better, or learn your weaknesses, by playing inferior talent all the time.
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That's precisely why I worked to get us into a big school tournament. One of the other 3 schools playing we actually played last year, we were competitive with them using only a few varsity, so I imagine with our whole team -- even though we're not as strong as last year -- we should be okay. Our regular season schedule is this way, so we've struggled to turn things up if we get into a jam, but no matter how good these teams are -- and I expect that WA State Champ to be extremely competitive -- they'll be a nice shift from playing our normal schedule as we've done every year since I've had this gig.
The other two public schools I don't know much about, but the main difference here between the 6A level and sub-6A is really about depth. Those teams might not be as technically proficient as we are, they'll rarely have club players (outside of the top teams) but your garden variety HS team here will still have a bunch of really scrappy athletes at every position.
So we can't steamroll them. If hadn't worked so hard on building our depth the past few years, there's no real way we'd be able to play these schools because we have a massive dropoff from our last viable varsity player to our JV, whereas a lot of these 6A schools will have a JV team that's competent and the best ones even have a JV2 team, we'll just never have that kind of depth at our school unless we started getting a glut of tennis players showing up.