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One week of the regular season and this season has been an interestng emotional ride. Given the loss in depth and leadership, we just didn't have anyone with the gravitas to fill the vacuum there. Our best player is still our best player and she leveled up considerably from playing doubles last year.
The deal with this team is if you play us with straight singles and doubles spots like in order of talent, we'd usually beat you because we're just a better singles team than we are at doubles. But even in that scenario there are some caveats.
Anyway, as I usually do, I did some late season lineup hijinks this week and it was a mistake against our rivals and the 3rd place team in the league
(the latter who we beat in the 2nd match of the year) who both beat us this week -- our first league losses in five years -- but the fact this team took this long to lose in league was kind of an accident of time anyway.
I'm obviously annoyed about it, but I blame myself for not running a tighter ship this year. I tried to give this team the latitude of a more experienced team and they're just not that. I'm not sure a tougher approach would've worked, but I do think more structure would've been good and frankly, this is the sort of team where having 2 assistant coaches would've been better because you could do drills and work on mechanics as we have a lot of raw players who could benefit from that kind of work and I don't think I managed the balance right.
Per usual, the kids are also overcommitted schedulewise so there are the same antics with missing practices and matches. Unlike my past teams, I don't have the talent + depth combo that makes it easier to mitigate when that happens.
We have Districts in a week -- we have two matches next week that I'll optimize for winning over any more lineup hijinks because I'm kind of tired of it. (We're 8-6 on the year, not a bad season when you consider 4 of those losses were to the Top 5A & 6A programs in the state.)
I've got a gameplan for winning the District tournament -- it'll take a bit of luck, just because I don't know what the wild cards will be and there's always one or two -- and have decided that would be the best outcome from this year.
I always used to tell my boys team back when i first started coaching here that the regular season in Oregon HS tennis doesn't matter, and I have to remind myself of that going into Districts and just work to optimize them for performance, specifically on the 1st day of Districts.
Either way, I think we maximized this roster...I'd just like to make sure we don't leave any meat on the bone heading into the off-season. I might coach again some day, but I'm 99.5% sure that I'm done with this team after this season. I've never had a spring here where I wasn't coaching and I'd like to get into some other stuff, the kids always being busy with side committments makes me want to pursue my own because it's always been disruptive to my life in a lot of ways but I felt committed to th club, so I'd just power through.
I've gotten more than what I needed out of it, I've given a lot too.
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