[ColoradoTree]

Really interesting news from the NCAA, which has decided that starting in 2024*, the NCAA individual tennis championships will be held in the fall, while the NCAA team championships will still follow the traditional dual match season in the spring. This will be a 2-year pilot program for Division I only, and it will be for both men's and women's tennis. If the NCAA likes how it works, then I'd expect it to expand to other divisions. 

A big, big change that will force programs to adjust to what most top teams (Stanford not included) have already figured out--the fall season is a bigger deal than it ever was, and your players will need to be in top form if they want to compete for an individual title. That means more fall tournaments, more summer matches to prepare for those tournaments, and less of an individual break overall. It won't be much change for teams like UNC and Pepperdine and Texas and many others, but it will be a marked difference for how Stanford operates. Lele has kept her program to a relatively sedate pace in the fall compared to other top programs, so this will require some adjustment if Stanford is to position its players to have the best chance at qualifying for an individual title. 

How the ITA responds is another question. Right now, the fall season concludes with ITA Fall Nationals, a singles and doubles tournament, and ITA regionals populate that tournament. Will the new NCAA individual championships take the place of Fall Nationals? How do the various regional tournaments become affected? Will we see a "Spring Nationals" from the ITA instead, a tournament to take place after the team NCAA tournament has concluded? Or will there simply be one all-encompassing individual NCAA tournament each year? 

* This is based off a brief Andy Katz video report from the NCAA convention, so it's not entirely clear whether the change is in effect starting in calendar year 2024 or the 2024-25 academic year, and thus whether we have the 2023-24 season's individual championships in May and the 2024-25 season's individual championships 6 months later, or whether we'll see the 2023-24 season's individual championships get shifted six months earlier. But in any event, a new dynamic of "fall is for individual tennis, spring is for team tennis" is a really interesting change. It's always sort of been that way anyway, but the fall season has also been less essential in the past, and sometimes top players skip it and focus on pro tournaments, and sometimes programs like Stanford decide to deemphasize it. But with a NCAA individual title up for grabs at the end of the fall, that sort of deemphasizing may no longer be tenable.

[ColoradoTree]

Really interesting news from the NCAA, which has decided that starting in 2024*, the NCAA individual tennis championships will be held in the fall, while the NCAA team championships will still follow the traditional dual match season in the spring. This will be a 2-year pilot program for Division I only, and it will be for both men's and women's tennis. If the NCAA likes how it works, then I'd expect it to expand to other divisions. 

A big, big change that will force programs to adjust to what most top teams (Stanford not included) have already figured out--the fall season is a bigger deal than it ever was, and your players will need to be in top form if they want to compete for an individual title. That means more fall tournaments, more summer matches to prepare for those tournaments, and less of an individual break overall. It won't be much change for teams like UNC and Pepperdine and Texas and many others, but it will be a marked difference for how Stanford operates. Lele has kept her program to a relatively sedate pace in the fall compared to other top programs, so this will require some adjustment if Stanford is to position its players to have the best chance at qualifying for an individual title. 

How the ITA responds is another question. Right now, the fall season concludes with ITA Fall Nationals, a singles and doubles tournament, and ITA regionals populate that tournament. Will the new NCAA individual championships take the place of Fall Nationals? How do the various regional tournaments become affected? Will we see a "Spring Nationals" from the ITA instead, a tournament to take place after the team NCAA tournament has concluded? Or will there simply be one all-encompassing individual NCAA tournament each year? 

* This is based off a brief Andy Katz video report from the NCAA convention, so it's not entirely clear whether the change is in effect starting in calendar year 2024 or the 2024-25 academic year, and thus whether we have the 2023-24 season's individual championships in May and the 2024-25 season's individual championships 6 months later, or whether we'll see the 2023-24 season's individual championships get shifted six months earlier. But in any event, a new dynamic of "fall is for individual tennis, spring is for team tennis" is a really interesting change. It's always sort of been that way anyway, but the fall season has also been less essential in the past, and sometimes top players skip it and focus on pro tournaments, and sometimes programs like Stanford decide to deemphasize it. But with a NCAA individual title up for grabs at the end of the fall, that sort of deemphasizing may no longer be tenable.