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Also, I know I said I wouldn't be back next season, but I changed my mind during the state tournament and talking to the AD. It felt a little unfair to my impending seniors to bail and also, I just wanted to see how we'd do with one more year under our belts.
On paper, you'd expect us to be a lot worse because we're losing our top 3 singles players, but it's not quite true.
I'm going to take half of our top double steam and she'll play 1-singles. She had enough talent this year to be a state semi-finalist in singles -- I almost had her play singles before we decided the doubles route, which was smarter in the end -- and we apparently have an 8th grader who is supposed to be as good as my 3rd singles player this year. She's seen her play before and said she's better than her...but I'll have to see it for myself.
Still, as a 9th grader I don't even need her to be that good just good enough to compete consistently.
With the two top singles spots pretty much fleshed out, we'd just have to figure out our doubles pairings. I'd take the last two doubles state qualifiers from this year and pair them together, they'd get along great, both are super competitive and I feel like over a whole season they'd gel pretty well.
Our super duo at 2nd doubles (11th / 10th) will come back a year wiser and more experienced and with the talent to make a run at state this time, hopefully hungrier after getting close to making state this past year.
That means I get to construct two strong doubles teams from the ten kids that I have left from this year's roster not listed above AND not counting any of the depth players who will show up the first week of practice/tryouts.
We've never done tryouts my previous 3 years, usually I would just bring the existing varsity kids with me and then kids who thought they could hang would come practice with varsity and either stick or not. That led to kids who were better than I realized being stuck on JV for too long and previously, JV never played a real schedule because our league doesn't have many programs who have big enough squads for JV schedules.
(In other states I've lived in, JV just plays after varsity...but here, it rarely happens that way. Only once since I've been head coach have we done that.)
This upcoming year, I'm going to give JV their own schedule entirely. It's going to be way more like "Varsity 2" when I coached in Colorado, where those teams would play small school varsity programs and JV teams of big schools. Even though we're small, the reason we've been successful since I took over is giving the developmental players a chance to play matches against good competition.
There are lots of schools in the area for them to play, which is nice. Conversely, I'll also make them play a few of the varsity matches that we usually hate playing against the bottom dwellers in our league. Hilariously, we've been accused for the past few years of bringing our JV to matches when that's not true.
This coming year? We'll for sure be doing that for the road swings of a few of these matches. We'll fill in their schedule with a few JV2 programs of big schools, a few JV programs where I think they can be competitive and maybe even a stray 6A or 5A varsity bottom-feeder, but I'll have to be tactical about that because nobody likes their varsity losing to your JV.
Every year I've coached, we've had 40+ girls to start the year and so I assume that we'll get those numbers again. Only half the kids that come out for JV want to play competitively, the rest are generally content to just play practice games and have fun. I'd hate to lose that, but I think the next evolution of having a full 2nd squad will be good for us.
There's a pathway to winning state again for us, but it's going to be strengthening our doubles pairings so we can get two state seeds in doubles & then having a singles player who can go far too.
Obviously, you never know what players are going to show up at the other schools, but...our depth is our advantage so that even if there's a strong singles player or two, it won't be enough to override.
Lastly, I'll be way less precious about trying to keep a perfect record as I had been the past year; the win streak was kind of fun for us...but losing that 6A match (albeit in the dumbest way) and then being charged with that regular season forfeit (it was strategic and ultimately, the right decision) was nice because now I don't have to go into next season worried about maintaining it.
The Oregon HS format is always dumbotown, because you can lose all your regular season matches but win the district title and state by having a few good players. But I'm going to revert back to my original thinking around treating the regular season as a series of practice matches that get us ready for Districts.
The other thing about having the two teams is that it frees us from what we ran into two seasons ago where I had a bunch of sophomores who were geared up to play and practice, with a bunch of seniors who expected to be on varsity. It allows me to ramp those younger players up in due course and grow their confidence, without throwing away players who have been reliable for us the past few years.
One of the things I don't talk about enough in this dynasty is how much I've grown as a coach in the past few years. You have to learn how to manage your personnel, but also how you approach each year with kids. You tighten stuff up, get a little better at personnel management, but also decide culturally what kind of program you've developing.
I feel like going into Year 5 of my varsity coaching situation -- 4 with this program -- I get to a much better sense of how I'm doing this. The one thing I'm missing is other coaches to lean on that aren't local. I might visit my old camp this summer and see if I can spend a day or two shadowing and picking up new drills. Because I don't coach for a living, you kind of get stale with stuff year to year.
I feel like I was way more prepared this year than I was last year for the job, and I'll surely go into next year a lot more poised to navigate things. Also, I'm probably less inclined to flirt with another 6A job (though the public school by my house would be tempting...I don't have the energy to start over with new kids until at least I graduate this group of seniors..) and that'll make things easier because the past two years I wasn't 100% sure I'd come back.
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