After decades of debate, JHSAA changes the way Jefferson plays tennis

By Daniel Mercer
Ashbury Times-Daily Sports

ASHBURY — For nearly four decades, high school tennis coaches in Jefferson have learned to coach two different sports.

Beginning next spring, the two will at least look a little more alike.

The Jefferson High School Activities Association's Executive Council voted Tuesday to replace the traditional five-singles, two-doubles regular-season dual with a three-singles, four-doubles format, ending more than 20 years of proposals, surveys, committee meetings and coaches-association debates over one of the state's most peculiar sporting traditions.

The change applies to boys and girls tennis in all nine classifications.

The JHSAA's one-singles, four-doubles postseason format — the rule responsible for most of the argument in the first place — isn't going anywhere.

"This wasn't a vote on one-and-four," JHSAA executive director Mara Ellison said. "That question was settled here a long time ago. The question was whether our regular season was preparing schools to play the kind of tennis we ask them to play in May."

Apparently, the answer was no.

The new seven-point dual will consist of three singles matches and four doubles matches. Eleven players will comprise a full lineup, up from nine under 5-and-2.

The JHSAA will continue allowing 5-and-2 competition at invitationals. Several established early-season tournaments are expected to retain — or return to — the old format, giving players further down the singles ladder opportunities to play singles.

That provision helped finally get a proposal across the line.

"I've been in rooms where this died three different times," said Tom Vickers, longtime North Coast High coach and past president of the Jefferson High School Tennis Coaches Association. "There were always five-and-two people who weren't moving, and there were one-and-four people who weren't moving. Three-and-four was the first thing where enough people looked around and said, 'I can live with that.'"

That may be the closest thing Jefferson tennis gets to consensus.

An argument that started in 1988

Jefferson's unusual State format dates to 1988.

Then-JHSAA executive director Walter H. Crandall, himself a former high school tennis coach, had become convinced that scholastic tennis placed too much emphasis on individual singles achievement and too little on building an actual team.

With support from a group of JHSTCA leaders, Crandall pushed through a State tournament format consisting of one singles match and four doubles matches.

His argument was simple and, for Jefferson tennis, enduring: high school tennis is a team sport.

There were already junior tournaments for singles players. There were rankings. There were college showcases. A good player did not lack places to demonstrate that she or he was a good player.

Crandall believed a school championship should test something else.

Ellison was a young JHSAA administrator when the change was adopted.

"I still agree with Walter's premise," she said Tuesday. "If all we're doing is recreating an individual tournament seven times and adding up the results, I don't know that we've made the strongest case for what school tennis contributes."

Not everybody agreed then. Not everybody agrees now.

But one-and-four survived.

Eventually it became one of those Jefferson rules that outsiders found odd and Jefferson coaches simply learned.

The problem was everything that happened before it.

Teams spent the regular season playing five singles matches and two doubles matches. Then the postseason arrived and eight of the nine starting positions were doubles positions.

"You'd spend two months answering one question and then State asked you another one," Ashbury Central athletic director Lisa Navarro said. "That's the part that became harder to defend."

'We weren't asking to get rid of State'

The disagreement has produced enough committee work to fill a filing cabinet.

The JHSTCA considered versions of 3-and-2, 3-and-3, 3-and-4 and expanded 1-and-4 proposals over the years. Some coaches simply wanted 5-and-2 used through the State final.

Others wanted one-and-four throughout the season.

That idea never gained broad support.

"I love one-and-four," said Cal Watanabe, the boys coach at Port Meridian North. "I wouldn't play it every Tuesday."

Watanabe laughed.

"You'd have a mutiny. Kids want singles matches."

That left a sizable middle group that was less concerned with defending any particular format than with the disconnect between regular-season and postseason tennis.

"The frustration wasn't that one-and-four was bad," said Angela Ruiz, girls coach at 8A Westover. "The frustration was that we'd spend all spring trying to figure out who our fourth and fifth singles players were, and then the minute the matches really mattered, those positions didn't exist."

For coaches who built their State lineups early, the problem worked in reverse.

Strong doubles combinations were routinely broken apart during the regular season because one member needed to fill a singles position. Then coaches spent April putting the pairs back together.

"You'd get to Regionals and say, 'All right, remember the doubles team you were six weeks ago? You're that again,'" Ruiz said. "That never made much sense."

Still, 5-and-2 had defenders.

"It ain't broke, don't fix it," Basalt Electric athletic director Jim Corbett said. "That's been my position for probably 15 years. Everybody understands five-and-two. Parents understand it. Kids understand it. You don't need a whiteboard to explain the lineup."

Corbett voted against the coaches association recommendation but said he does not consider the new format unreasonable.

"My concern is eleven kids," he said. "That's nothing at a big school. Go find eleven tennis players at some of our smallest schools every spring and tell me it's nothing."

That issue was among the reasons previous proposals stalled.

The experiment that wouldn't go away

Three-and-four gained traction almost by accident.

The JHSAA began permitting experimental 3S/4D showcases several seasons ago, initially as a way for coaches to test larger lineups and get more doubles competition before State.

They became popular.

Then coaches began asking for more of them.

"That was probably what changed the conversation," JHSTCA president Sharon Eddings said. "Nobody had to sell three-and-four anymore. Coaches had played it."

The format solved several problems at once.

It produced an odd number of courts, guaranteeing a winner without resorting to sets-won or games-won tiebreak procedures. It expanded the varsity lineup from nine players to 11. Four doubles matches made partnership tennis a majority of the dual without reducing the sport to the State tournament's single singles position.

And for coaches, it provided something less philosophical: places to put kids.

"Your fourth and fifth singles players are often the kids you're trying to figure out anyway," Eddings said. "Maybe they're going to become doubles players. Maybe they're younger. Maybe they're hanging onto a singles spot because that's how we've always filled out the card. Now you can start developing them as doubles players earlier."

That does not mean S2 and S3 will necessarily be a team's second- and third-best players.

In fact, many Jefferson coaches already reject that assumption.

Under the State format, programs commonly protect their best singles player at S1 and use many of their next-best players to build four strong doubles teams. The new regular-season format gives coaches considerably more freedom to do the same thing before May.

"People are going to look at our lineup sometimes and say, 'How is your ninth-best kid playing second singles?'" Watanabe said. "Because the other seven are helping us win four doubles matches. That's the answer."

More kids, different jobs

Players have noticed that part, too.

Maya Logan-Redding, a junior at Beacon Hill, spent much of last season moving between singles and doubles before playing doubles during the Beacons' run to the 4A State final.

"I like singles," Logan-Redding said. "Everybody likes getting a court to themselves sometimes. But if you know you're probably going to play doubles at State, you want to actually have a partner and play together."

She said keeping 5-and-2 invitationals matters.

"I'd be mad if singles just disappeared," she said. "This seems better."

Eastmont Christian senior Kaliyah Hauser was more succinct.

"Four doubles is more fun," she said.

Hauser would know. Eastmont's doubles depth helped carry the Ibex to last season's 4A championship.

That team is also the kind JHSAA officials believe illustrates the new format's possibilities. Eastmont had an elite No. 1 singles player in Ali Rehe, but its strength extended through four doubles teams. The Ibex beat Beacon Hill 4-1 in the State final despite losing D1.

"That is a team," Ellison said. "Your first pair loses and you don't collapse. Somebody else wins."

The old format isn't dead

Five-and-two will remain part of Jefferson tennis.

The association's tournament regulations will allow invitationals to designate 5S/2D as their competition format, and several tournament directors told the Times-Daily they intend to do so.

JHSTCA officials expect some of the state's oldest invitationals to actively advertise themselves as "classic" or traditional-format events.

That was deliberate.

"We didn't want a kid who loves singles to hear, 'Sorry, there are only three spots now,'" Eddings said. "There should still be weekends where you get to find out how deep your singles lineup really is."

It could also give the season a rhythm unique to Jefferson.

Early tournaments can test singles depth. The regular season will test a broader 11-player lineup. The postseason will reduce the card to nine and put the greatest pressure on doubles construction.

Three formats. Three different questions.

"It's high school sports," Vickers said. "We're allowed to have our own way of doing things."

State associations routinely make precisely those kinds of choices. High-school tennis formats already vary considerably between jurisdictions, and governing bodies regularly use coaches committees, advisory groups and boards to settle questions of lineup composition, postseason qualification and participation. Iowa, for example, explicitly prescribes a six-singles, three-doubles format for determining postseason team strength, while Indiana requires ability-order lineups and has repeatedly altered its tournament structure through recommendations from its coaches association.

The JHSAA's decision fits that tradition, even if its solution remains distinctly Jefferson.

Not everybody is finished arguing

Tuesday's vote won't end the discussion.

Some coaches already worry that 11-player lineups will favor the state's largest schools, where varsity programs may have 20 or more capable players. JHSAA staff said participation and forfeiture rates will be monitored closely, particularly in 1A through 3A.

Others believe three singles matches are still too many.

A small but persistent one-and-four faction remains.

And traditionalists have not suddenly decided Crandall was right in 1988.

"Ask me in three years," Corbett said. "If we're getting good matches and the small schools can fill the card, I'll tell you I was wrong."

He paused.

"But I'm keeping the old scorebooks."

For Ellison, who has now watched the argument from inside the JHSAA for nearly its entire life, Tuesday's vote was less a repudiation of the old system than the completion of something left unfinished.

The association decided in 1988 what it wanted its championship to say about high school tennis.

It took almost 40 years to decide what the rest of the season should say.

"One-and-four made a statement," Ellison said. "Three-and-four gives coaches a season in which to build toward it."

The new format takes effect with the 2028 boys and girls tennis seasons.