High school tennis is very competitive. Some players train their whole lives to play tennis at just the high school level; players and coaches take the game very seriously.
This causes the worse team to beat a better, more balanced team.
A high school tennis team is like a ladder: the best players on the top platform, the best player should be the one-singles player and then there are two other singles players taking the 2 singles and 3 singles spots. Then you move on to the doubles where there is a one, two, three, and four doubles position.
The worst players on the varsity team should be the four doubles players.
High school tennis tryouts are played as a sort of tournament where if you win you go higher on the team, so if a player wanted to choose to play doubles they could just intentionally lose and play a lower line.
How high school tennis works is different from how regular tennis is played. Usually players play for themselves individually, but high school tennis is called “team tennis.” It consists of 11 players on varsity split into doubles, which has two players and singles players which are just yourself.
The teams have these rankings set so when you play a different team the one-singles would play the other teams one singles and so down the lines. The matches are won by winning more matches overall than the other team.
Singles and doubles tennis are completely different games; both require different skills and strategies to take down the opponents. Players sometimes prefer playing a specifically doubles or singles matchplay. So, that leads to the question of whether players should be allowed to choose to play doubles or singles.
In some cases, coaches will put the better overall player in what the player wants, not accounting for how the other teams would match up to it. This is called stacking.
When you look at some of the scores of a very balanced team, you can tell that they are not stacking because the team that is better will win the better lines and then struggle with the worse lines
While a team that is stacking will, most likely, lose the singles matches but win the doubles matches, and this is the issue because there are three singles lines and four doubles lines, so even if all the singles players win their matches because the other team has placed the better players down low, and worse team will win all the doubles matches, therefore winning the overall games against the other team 4-3.
This is why coaches should be encouraged to try and keep their teams balanced and correct to keep the game fair and fun.
