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As you can probably tell from my messages before this, I was second-guessing myself on the tactic I employed this year (over)emphasizing doubles. In the end, it was probably a balance of managing senior feelings (tm) coupled with giving people a semi-preference of teammate and also trying to ensure we were giving our best opportunities to win. One of the wild cards is that our rival's new coach is formidable and their team really leveled up in the past few weeks.
It's made it more clear to me I need a full-time assistant coach to work with me on the fine-tuning of our operation because we just aren't going to be able to keep up if we don't develop our talent.
At the end of the day, we didn't win the District title narrowly and finished 2nd after two of our doubles teams finished 2nd and 4th today. Our 3rd doubles entry lost to the 4-seeded 2nd doubles team from the rivals, meaning we both got 2 doubles teams to state, they got an additional singles player and we didn't, which might be tactical issue on my part...but I think I did the best with the information I was working with, and ultimately, the goal was able maximizing for a run at State.
I think reflecting back, I would not count points we haven't won, and when there's a chance to protect players at the top of the bracket, you have to take those opportunities rather than getting greedy, because there's probably a world where we could've still gotten two doubles teams to state and a singles player had I not insisted on the plan of going for 3 in doubles.
Nothing we can do about that now, though. We had 5 quarterfinalists, which in a year where the bracket was insanely big -- over 40 entries in each -- it was a lot harder to get to state this year than ever before, you had to win 3 or 4 matches whereas in past years you only had to win twice if you got a bye.
We'll see how State goes in a week. I think the key positive is that all 3 of our freshman phenoms will go to State as 9th graders and given that player development has been a big part of what I've tried to emphasize with this team, not overindexing on seniors and giving my underclassmen opportunities to develop happened a lot this year, in part out of necessity.
The other thing that threw a wrinkle into this year wasn't just losing 5 state qualifers from the state title team, but also having 3 returners not come back and a 4th get hurt before the post-season. Once I was able to put it into perspective, it changed how I viewed all of it.
So we'll be back to State in a week and after a day off this week, we'll get back into the lab and see if we can tighten up what we need to on this thing. There were some really bright spots throughout this event, even in the semi-final and finals that I think make me feel like it's great we get another crack at these teams if we play our cards right.
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