How a changing team can affect the players.

I’ve been on the tennis team since freshman year, and each year has been a vastly different experience for me and my teammates. Aside from the obvious aspect of having new teammates as the seniors graduate each year and new Freshman take their places, one experience that has separated the tennis team from most of the other sports teams is that we have had different sets of coaches every year. To continue the trend, for my senior year, we will have yet another set. I have generally seen getting new coaches as a positive change to the team, but it can also come with difficulties. Running a whole team of high school tennis players requires a lot of time and effort.  The coach needs  to get to know each player, know their strengths and weaknesses to be able to place them in an ideal spot. From my experience, out of all three of the years, my freshman year was the most successful because there were only two new freshman (including me), and it was a lot easier to fit us into the ranking of the team. Both of us had similar skill sets and had played tennis together since we were young, so it was easy enough to slip us in as a doubles team and refrain from switching up the rest of the line-up. After my freshman year it was much harder to make a successfully lined up team because during my sophomore year we got our first pair of new coaches.  At this point I had only ever competed as a doubles player but since the coaches didn’t have enough time to evaluate the team before our first match, not only was I moved to singles, but I played first singles on varsity, which was too much of a “mismatch” in terms of skill. Many other people on the team felt like they were placed in an unsuitable position for their skill, and combined with the lack of time and communication with the coaches, there was a less than ideal coach-player dynamic.

My junior year, we had two entirely new coaches with two entirely different approaches to running a team. Luckily more input was taken into consideration when making the lineup, and for the most part, people who wanted to play singles got to play singles, and people who wanted to play doubles played doubles. I was happy that I was playing doubles, but our coach couldn’t quite figure out what combination of players worked with each other. Over the course of the season, I was switched between 1st and 2nd doubles numerous times, and I played with a total of six different partners because the partnerships didn’t work the way our coach wanted them to.  A major problem with this approach was that no one was ever able to get used to the playing skills of their partners and had to constantly adjust to new strengths and weaknesses. On top of that, one of the two coaches suddenly had to leave midway through the season, and we didn’t replace her until the last few weeks of the season. All three of my years on the tennis team were amazing and so fun, but having constant changes to our team was a lot of work. I hope for the next years of the girls’ tennis team that we are able to find long term coaches to support the team in the long run.

Your Tennis Captain,

Bianca Delbusto ’18