Play To Clinch: August 14th Update Playthrough

Even though I build a college tennis sim, what I really ever wanted was a high school tennis sim but college tennis is what happened because all of the basketball PC sims made it an easier mental model to develop.

College changes

The biggest college adaptation is the format. College rosters are among the smallest of any sport and I thought without the real world contraints, why not expand it? So now it's different.

D1: 10 SINGLES / 5 DOUBLES (for 1 point) = 11 points
D2 & D3: 8 SINGLES / 3 DOUBLES = 11 points
D4: 10 SINGLES / 3 DOUBLES = 13 points

This envisions a world that actually cares about college tennis, but also expands rosters considerably and turns the sport into more of a team sport as a result. I think the idea stemmed from watch colege squash (which is comprised of 9 singles duels) and thinking "what would 9th singles look like" and then setting out to essentially find out by designing it in my game.

What's fun about this, more players get to play more consequential matches. Like all sports where a backup or underdog can win you the game, this is also now possible for tennis where 7th or 8th singles clutch play can win the day for a team with depth.

Once I built the JHSAA fictional state HS universe for ApexVarsity, it occurred to me that it didn't have to just live inside a fictional spec, that I could easily import it into the Play to Clinch universe as I immediately wanted to know how some of the schools would do and bring them to life. So I did. Jefferson -- our fictional west coast state with around 17 million people -- is basically Texas on the Coast and my thinking is that now I can sort of have storylines around following particular schools and players over the course of the sim. The coincides with some work I've done on the backend to expand US and Canadian player generated hometowns, because for a while it was a pretty feeble list.

I also did a pretty cheap redesign of the site taking the color themes from ApexVarsity, along with the custom fonts and boosted the type because the old design was really bad to read. It's still kind of sloppy in parts, but its's a simulated designed for one person, so I'm not preening too heavily on the QOL things I'd be more obsessed about if I was releasing this publicly for users. I pulled the live version off Fly a while ago, because all of my sims were there without users and it wasn't really worth spending money to host them, also they're all so bespoke (2 of the 3 are invented sports) that I just wasn't in the mood to go further. I think at some point that's going to change I think, as it'd be fun to test them out on more folks.

How the school season works in Jefferson

District double round robin — you play every league opponent home and away — plus 4–8 non-district duals, so in a 12-team league that's around 22-26 duals per season. The regular season format across the state is 5 singles and 2 doubles for a total of 9 players on a varsity roster. The post-season format actually changes to 1 singles and 4 doubles. Why? Because it's fake and I can do what I want.

Real reason? HS tennis often doesn't feel like a real sport and a lot of people treat doubles like an afterthought. The overwhelming majority of high school tennis players never pick up a racket after high school, so this isn't basketball there's no major training here, so I think why wouldn't doubles be the preferred model for high school tennis? There's no way such a format swap would play well in real life, but I love it relative to the ways other states operate, there's no consistent format anywhere. Everything ranges from 3 singles/2 doubles which is what I grew up with on east coast, to other formats that are more like college where the same players who play singles can also play doubles (6/3 in NCAA formats) but in HS the goal is participation and access so it's likely to have the doubling up.

A rating system so good I can use it in a fake high school sim

TOSS, the power rating I refined for oregontennis.org my rating system for real Oregon HS tennis is also available inside this game. The idea behind the entire stystem (which you can read about) is basically to mathematically discourage teams from playing better worse at worse flights. It works pretty well at evaluating teams playing each other across classifications, because much like in college, the strength rules around "bigger v smaller" don't apply 1:1. In sports like soccer or football, it's not common for very large schools (7A/6A to play very small schools 3A/2A) because the advantages of having bigger pools of kids means your teams are just deeper. In tennis, with smaller rosters, this advantage is sometimes neutralized though not completely.

My next post will get into the post-season structure, the iterations I've done over the last few days working on this with regard to scheduling, refining the playoff format and road to the playoffs too. It's been fun to reconsider how post-seasons would work without a lot of the historical lens that currently plague formats, but for a fictional game with no constiuents, contemplating "fairness" and "interestingness" over the real world challenges.