Baseline Jefferson

By Nate Calder
August 22, 2027 · Rules, Data Desk

So, What Exactly Was Wrong With 5-and-2?

The 3-and-4 vote is done. Everybody has had their meeting-room argument about it. Five-and-two people are annoyed. One-and-four people wanted more. Athletic directors have begun counting uniforms. Somewhere a coach is already figuring out whether his No. 4 singles player can volley.

Now we get to the useful question: what did the old format actually reward?

I went through the full 2027 girls season because it gives us a pretty convenient farewell sample: 861 programs, 10,332 players and 13,489 duals. Most of those were the regular 5S/2D card, with 947 early-season 3S/4D matches already sitting there as a preview. Showcases and postseason play used 1S/4D.

There are a lot of ways to slice this. The easiest one is also my favorite.

Here are the individual positions most associated with winning regular-season duals:

There it is.

The 5-and-2 format was the No. 2 singles format.

S2 was more closely tied to team success than S1. So were S3 and S4. S5 came next. Doubles was hanging around down by the concession stand.

That checks out with years of watching these matches. The really obnoxious teams weren't necessarily the ones with the best player in the district. They were the teams where you got through the first two singles matches and realized, oh great, their No. 4 can actually play too.

That was 5-and-2 depth.

And it worked. Win S2 and you won the dual 77.6% of the time. S3: 75.0%. S4: 74.6%. Even S5 got you to 72.2%.

Win D1?

55.9%.

For all the talk about JHSAA's doubles culture, the regular-season scoring system spent most of the spring telling coaches to find five singles players.

Then May happened.

The annual May furniture rearrangement

I ran the same exercise against postseason winning percentage.

Which regular-season courts were most associated with winning after the JHSAA lineup shrank to S1 plus four doubles?

That's a pretty good description of why coaches have been arguing about this for 20 years.

S2 goes from the most informative court in the regular season to the fourth-most informative piece once the postseason arrives.

S4 goes from .710 to .254.

D1 and D2, the two weakest regular-season indicators, jump to the top.

The JHSAA has been running two different talent markets.

During league play, a good fourth singles player is gold.

At State, she needs a partner.

Where did S4 and S5 actually go?

This is where the 3-and-4 argument gets more interesting than the usual “two fewer singles courts” arithmetic.

The State lineup still uses nine players. The people aren't disappearing. Their jobs are changing.

I tracked postseason players back to the position they played most often during the regular season.

The migration looks like this:

S1 is the easy one: 81.5% of regular No. 1s stay at No. 1.

After that, the singles ladder basically gets folded into the doubles lineup.

About 89% of S2 players who move into the State card wind up at D1 or D2. S4 splits heavily between D2 and D4. S5 does almost the same thing.

This is the part coaches have known forever and the old lineup card hid from everybody else.

Your fourth singles player was probably going to have to become a doubles player.

Your fifth singles player too.

Under 5-and-2, they could spend March and April playing singles while coaches tried to maintain doubles pairs around them. Then the postseason arrived and everybody got rematched.

Under 3-and-4, that sorting starts during the season.

That matters a lot more than “four doubles matches instead of two.”

The early 3-and-4 matches were already doing this

The 947 trial-format duals are useful here because the lineup movement already starts looking like the State card.

S1 mostly stays S1.

S2 moves between S2 and the upper doubles courts.

S3 gets some singles and starts feeding D2.

S4 turns into a doubles player much more frequently.

S5 shows up heavily at D4.

If you're coaching toward May, that's useful information in March.

You get to learn whether the kid with the big forehand and shaky second serve works better next to your steady sophomore. You get to leave pairs together for a few weeks. Your ninth-best singles player can play S2 while four better all-around players build doubles teams.

This is going to offend ladder purists immediately.

Good. We should at least know what we're arguing about.

Also: the matches were good

The simplest fear about adding two doubles courts is that scores will get weird.

They didn't.

One-court decisions:

• 5/2: 44.1%
• 3/4: 46.9%
• 1/4: 47.0%

Average winning margin:

• 5/2: 2.68 courts
• 3/4: 2.58
• 1/4: 2.43

The 3-and-4 trials produced more 4-3 duals than the old format.

That feels right from the matches I've watched too. Four doubles courts create a lot of ways to get to four points. A great singles group can take three and hunt for one doubles court. A doubles-heavy team can survive getting smoked at S2 and S3. One monster at S1 still matters because everybody would very much like to begin the afternoon 1-0.

You get different shapes of good teams.

That is fun.

Benton Park is the poster child for the old system

The 9A champions were ridiculous last year.

Their regular-season singles winning percentages:

S1: .957
S2: 1.000
S3: .913
S4: .957
S5: 1.000

Imagine looking down the courts and realizing their fifth singles player basically never loses.

Benton Park went undefeated.

Their D2 winning percentage was .391.

Five-and-two barely cared. Benton could drop that court all afternoon and keep winning 5-2.

Then State arrived.

Four doubles points.

Benton eventually beat Cortland 3-2 for the 9A championship.

That's a great team. It also had to rebuild the part of its lineup the regular season gave it very little incentive to care about.

Bridgeport offers the other version. The 6A champs went .957 at D1 and .957 at D2 all year and rolled through the final 4-1.

Then there's Lodestone. The 2A champions were .360 at D1 and .560 at D2 with a deep singles ladder and somehow solved the State puzzle well enough to beat Baptist 3-2.

Three champions, three roster shapes.

That part of Jefferson tennis should survive just fine.

What changes next year

Here's the part casual fans are probably going to notice first.

The fourth-best singles player at a school might be playing doubles.

The ninth-best player on the roster might be playing No. 2 singles.

This will cause at least one parent to send an email before March 15.

The new card gives coaches seven points:

S1, S2, S3, D1, D2, D3, D4.

If I'm trying to build a State team, I care very much about S1. After that, I want eight players who can give me four excellent doubles combinations.

Maybe my second-best player is a killer singles player and stays at S2.

Maybe players 2 through 9 are my doubles group and player 10 gets S2.

Both can make sense.

We've already seen the 1/4 postseason force coaches into those decisions. The difference is that now we'll get to watch the teams being built.

And that's probably the biggest consequence of 3-and-4.

The old standings told us a lot about who could run out five singles players.

Next year's standings should tell us more about who has an actual State lineup.

For a state that has spent nearly four decades insisting that school tennis is a team game, it took us a surprisingly long time to make the regular-season lineup act like one.