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The new season is here. We're a few days into practice and it's going to be an interesting year.
As I anticipated, my putative best player (if you've been following along the one who played 1st doubles last year and who I had to recruit to get to play for us in her junior year) isn't sure she's gonna play HS tennis for senior year.
My 2nd doubles team who I was excited about, one of half of them split between us and track and she's gonna mostly prioritize track this year and her doubles partner is injured.
My freshman class has 3 legit talents, two of whom who could take over the 1/2 singles mantle from the outset. I'm less concerned about the regular season, and i'm more interested in strategizing a lineup that'll get us the best chance to sneak a title at state. With that #1 player still around out east, the singles title is really for 2nd place.
Two semi-finalists in double and a singles semi-finalist would be enough for us to win state. I think we have enough pieces to wield together two strong doubles teams from among the players we have left. One of the freshman phenoms could play singles and so long as I could get them seeded would be a state qualifer too.
The real outlier is seeing what other teams have reloaded with. We'll get a lot of reps and with our extremely tough schedule this year, at least these kids will be battle tested no matter what happens. It'll be weirder than we're used to, because we've never lost a match with full strength since I've been coach and I think getting them over the idea that "losing a match" means something will be interesting.
We still have another 7 days of practice before our first regular season match, I'm glad I got us two March matches this year, because it would have been super frustrating to wait until April and playing our normal league schedule wouldn't have sussed out for us how good we really are.
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