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Regular season is complete and we end with another record breaking 15-3 regular season. Most thing I'm proud of is after we came back from that big school tournament, my wonder was whether the drop in competition would make us play worse and I sort of emphasized a need for us to keep up the intensity and beat the teams we're supposed to beat.
The squad responded and we didn't lose another match in the final two weeks of the season, going 6-0 including our regular season finale over a 5A team we added at the last minute, on "senior skip day" (day before prom) meaning that all but two of the seniors weren't able to play AND we had an underclassmen hurt for the season AND one of our key singles/doubles utility types also not available.
Somehow, our 4th doubles rotation team playing 2nd doubles were able to split sets against a 6A team and win a 10-point in lieu of 3rd set to capture us the outright win (otherwise it'd have been 4-4) and I was pretty pumped about their resilience, given we didn't sweep singles like I'd hoped we would (we won 3 of the 4 singles slate)
Districts are this week. We have 3 of our 4 doubles teams with seeds, which is about as good as we could hope for. Now they just have to do their part.
Singles will be more fraught, because we put essentially our Top 5 players in the doubles bracket (I still think the smartest strategy, just higher risk) and so while I was able to get our winningest singles player seeded (I've never seen a non- 1&2 singles player get a seed, so this was kinda big) they all have relatively tough draws to get to state. Doable for one of them to do it, but..they'll need to play well tomorrow and we'll just see how the cards play out.
Our injured sophomore would've done well in that bracket, but I'm glad it wasn't one of the integral members of a doubles pairing or something.
My greedy goal is getting 4 entries (a singles & 3 doubles) to state, because it'd maximize my strategy of getting points around the bracket. Bad scenario would be only getting 2 doubles teams and nobody else, but they're strong teams and would be seedable if it happened, so...we wouldn't be dead in the water.
I feel like that 6A tournament was a good indication of our resilience and historically we've over-performed at Districts in every year I've been the head coach, so I'm really hoping we can do it again. The singles bracket is weaker than it's ever been in the last 4 years, and it's also massive 40 entries in singles, 37 in doubles is almost twice the size of the bracket from when I first started this dynasty, but the league got bigger and now some teams have full rosters when they used to only have half teams.
We'll see how it plays out. I'm happy with our regular season, but I realize that my strategy will only pay off if we manage to finish the job. Singles would've been pretty simple and the freshman would've gained experience that paid off, fortunately, they're all pretty happy playing doubles & the parents are all on board with it too, which is why this has gone so smoothly this year by and large.
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