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We lost our dual against the team from across the border. To be fair, when I scheduled that match, I thought I'd have 3 people who ended up not coming back from last season's team, I don't know if I'd have scheduled it not knowing that...but it was nice to take the trip and for us to play another competitive team.
Still, without them we comported ourselves pretty well. And my lineup emphasized our doubles pairings since I want them to get experience playing together against better competition, so we only won 1 of the 5 matches but 2nd doubles split sets and we didn't play out the 3rd set fully (10 pt tiebreaker) so I consider that a half win because it's two freshmen playing together for the first time against a team better than anything they'll see until state.
They responded well as a team to the upskill in competition for sure.
Today, we took on our rivals and I didn't expect to lose but I also wasn't sure how good their new players would be and how much their other kids improved.
We won 5-3, winning all the singles and 4th doubles. Our other doubles teams in losses all played competitively despite not having their best stuff at points. It's a lot of the early season stuff with positioning and mistakes, but like...nobody was out of any match 3 of the matches we lost featured tiebreakers (3rd doubles was a 6-7, 6-7 loss lol...)
Given this is the highwater mark for our league this year, I feel very good about it. The kids walked away pretty excited about the W, it was truly gutsy and it could have easily gone a different way, so I'm extremely jazzed that we managed it.
We play tomorrow and 3 times next week before that big 6A tournament. But this is one of those signature wins that sets the tone of the rest of the year and I'm frankly glad we got it out of the way.
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