Greetings to All,
Our Stingrays had a great week on the tennis courts last week. We won all three of our matches and had a solid day of practice on Wednesday. This week we have a practice on Wednesday and a match on Friday.
Friday's match is against Sebastian River Middle School, beginning at 4 p.m. Players need to be there as close to 3:30 as possible, no later than 3:45. The match will be held at the Sebastian River High School's tennis courts. You should park in the East Parking Lot between the High School and the Performing Arts Center. The courts are behind the high school, so park in back. Make sure your child brings something to drink, either water or a sports drink such as Gatorade. It would also be a good idea to have an apple or a banana to eat between matches.
As you may have noticed, our team has many more players on our team than our opponents have on their teams. Gifford Middle School had 32 players sign up and it was decided that they would "share" their extra players with Imagine Charter School and the Masters Academy so that those two schools would have enough players to field a team. As it happens, both Oslo Middle School and the team we play this week, Sebastian River Middle School, both have small rosters too, less than 10 players on each team. We have 20 players on our team.
This impacts us on match days. Since our opponents have fewer players on their teams, some of our team's roster have to sit and wait until our opponents have players available for our players to play against. The best solution to this situation is to have our players play "practice matches" against teammates until our opponents have players available to compete against. This is what happened last week. We want our kids to play tennis, not watch tennis, so having our kids play matches against other kids on our own team is better than waiting until 5 p.m. until being able to play against an opponent. Another solution would be for us to have some kids on our team take the day off and I'm OK with that too so long as I'm given sufficient notice, but if your children really want to improve their game, then they need to play tennis and it really doesn't matter so much who they play against in many cases, just so long as they play.
Sebastian High School has 8 courts. We play 7 "official" matches: 5 singles matches and 2 doubles matches. The rest of the matches are considered "practice matches". So, if Sebastian River Middle School does not bring 9 players and it is highly likely that they won't, then I would like our team to play practice matches against each other while the "official matches" are being played on the other courts.
As always, thank you for your support of the tennis program at Storm Grove Middle School.
Respectfully,
Coach Daugherty
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