So USTA captains, you've worked hard to make your lineups all season, keep the players happy and keep winning. In January you got the Districts and Sectionals plans. You shared them with your players immediately and pointed out where and when they would be playing. You asked them to save the weekend, and mostly they said they would. But now that the event is coming up, you found out that they scheduled a vacation that weekend because they assumed everyone else could cover for them (but everyone thought that). They've never missed their kid's soccer game all season and they can't bear to break their streak. There's a family picnic and it's the un-missable event of the season. And the rest are hurt. You qualified a whopping 20 players, and 5 are willing to show. Who else has had this happen, and what (if anything) did you do about it, either for the current team or for the next season's edition?
Which is *exactly* why I stopped caring beyond building rosters of *adults* who:
--can reply to a weekly proposed lineup email with 24-48 hours with a simple 'in' or 'out'
--are not jerks -- do not cause drama on courts or among each other
--show up at least 10 mins early (or let me know they'll be cutting in close).
--are open to play with whomever they get paired with (and understand I also have an idea of who gels well together and not, who prefers singles, etc).
My 3.5 team is always at the top of the flight, contending for state champ, in order to make sectionals. three straight years we either made the state final, or needed one more match to make it. and of course 2/3 of the team wasn't available (it's always late July/august). i learned to make it past all the injuries, vacations, soccer matches, etc, you have to build a ridiculously sized roster, which of course means people will only get 2-3 matches at best during the course of the summer. This is not what the vast majority of people sign up for. They want to play just about every week, with an occasional bye, get their exercise, drink beer after, make new tennis friends, and have fun.
Which, IMO, is also why you generally see the same teams winning the flights regularly. There are the 10% who have this burning desire to go to sectionals/nationals will arrange their entire life around rec tennis, for the privilege of spending upwards of $2-3000 to go fly somewhere and get their asses kicked by an even more stacked team of sandbaggers and try-hards. I have nothing against that at all...more power to 'em...but since I'm not making any money doing this, I decided I don't need to be the guy trying to find lightning in a bottle. And it's made being captain much more manageable, smooth, and less of a time constraint on my life. And guess what - our teams are still always at the top of the flight...or not...and still having a good time.
disclaimer: my wife's 4.0 team went to nationals @ Indian Wells back in 2015. It was a wonderful experience! But what made it so was that a) we had never been to that part of the country before, so we made it a fun vacation, and b) in terms of league tennis, it was a totally organic team-build, and they got lucky with no injuries to key people, and no schedule conflicts...there were a few who couldn't make it, but they caught that lighting that year. A bunch of them got moved to 4.5 and that 4.0 Nationals is a fond memory, and that's about it. None of them have ever gotten close again.
