Transcript
with the San Coaches Corner on KWBG. Gonna talk some boys tennis today as we talk Boon Boys Tennis. That is Jed Hammond joining us as the Torridors get ready for. Well, it's kind of that interesting part of the season because you're gonna go finish up the regular season. You got post season. I think, Jed, am I right? Is Fort Dodge still on the schedule though? Yes, we are making up our Fort Dodge meets tomorrow here. I will be headed to Fort Dodge on Tuesday and we'll get to play Nevada as well. We'll have some make-up meets from a couple weeks ago on a Monday when we got rained out. Okay, so those are still on the schedule. So we got a couple that are gonna still be here and then boom, we get into post season here this weekend. I guess first though, Jed, I should take you back to Northpoke because that's been our last opportunity to hit the courts. Northpoke Tournament, tell me how you felt. You know, it was a good day. One match anyway goes different. You know, we win the tournament. It was a three-way race. You know, depending how you score that tournament, if we score it like Pella scores their invite and get points based on the place that you finish, we win that tournament based off that scoring. Northpoke still uses the old district format team scoring where you get three points for a doubles win and two points for a singles win. And so we came up just short, but a point and a half separated the top three teams and those are all three really solid teams. So, I mean, if we get one win that goes any other way, we win it and the other two fall behind us. So, you know, overall, we had all four of our entries finished in the top four and we, you know, we lost a couple of close races. Patrick Howser got to play number one players from each of the schools. So, you know, he beat Southeast Pokes number one player in the first round and lost a really tight contest to Indianola's number one. And so a great experience for him and our doubles team, our top doubles team of Jordan and Grout had a good day, you know, just ended up coming up against Moon and he's just a fantastic player, regardless if he's in singles or doubles and he was just making play after play on us and we were playing the best we could, but he's just a really solid player. How'd the boys walk away, Jed? When you have an opportunity to speak with them, you know, either away from the court or the ride home or whatever, how'd the boys kind of walk away from it? You know, we're a real competitive program and of course finishing third didn't sit well with them. You know, we were half point behind Indianola and a point to half behind North Polk. So, you know, they were excited for some of the things that had gone well for them, but still disappointed in the overall result of finishing third and, you know, it's just a, I just keep stressing that this is a journey and each day is a learning experience for us and I thought there was a lot of good growth and learning that took place in that day. You know, again, it just all comes down to can we get everybody healthy and get everybody back in the lineup and thankfully enough this last week we were able to have everybody back in our lineup. I would say we're probably back to about 85% healthy. We're still dealing with some small nicks and bruises and things like that, but, you know, hopefully throughout this week, we can, you know, we took the whole weekend off and we are gonna go real heavy this week. Well, we'll use tomorrow as a kind of a tune-up and good to have one more meet to practice and then we'll kind of taper into the weekend and hopefully try to get everybody, you know, feeling good and healthy as possible for Saturday. Well, that's what I was gonna ask you about because you do have an opportunity to play obviously tomorrow and then you got a couple of days until Saturday. So, Jed, do you wait to see how everybody's feeling after tomorrow or what's kind of the process for you this week and it's not that you've never gone through injuries before, but I'm gonna be honest, this seems like a season that's maybe been a little bit more than normal. Yeah, we've dealt with a lot of just a little odds and ends throughout the season here this year that we haven't dealt with in the past. You know, I think last couple of years, I've been dealt like a major injury that's been, you know, one kid and, but that's handled differently obviously than just the little aches and pains that we're dealing with, with shin splints and, you know, knee stresses and, you know, some ankles and things like that. So, you know, we've been doing a lot of just trying to get the kids to do a lot of their own rehab as well, trying to, you know, open up the training room and getting in and doing, you know, ice baths. There's just so much research with getting in and that cold therapy. And so getting kids to make sure that they're, you know, wrapping shoulders and knees with ice packs when they're done and, you know, making sure we're trying to stay off them as much as possible. And, you know, just been doing a lot of stretching, you know, before and after practice, encouraging them to stress on their stretch on their own. So, you know, all those things are really important as we head in and, you know, we always try to work to kind of taper going, going in. Districts are a little bit different this year. Normally districts would be on Wednesday. So we would play that Northpoke tournament on Friday and we'd kind of taper into Wednesday district with, without getting pushed back to Saturday, I was actually kind of excited to play another meet. I didn't really want to go a whole week without playing the meets. So kind of worked out that we had a reschedule because I think it'll be good for our kids to go compete one more time. Not necessarily will they all compete in both meets, like singles and doubles. We're kind of talking through that right now. I think some of my kids that have been a little banged up maybe will only play two or three matches instead of all four. Give my JB kids a great opportunity to play some varsity matches tomorrow as well. So we'll do a combination of both. Obviously we want to go win both of them, but in the grand scheme of things, neither of them really mattered towards anything with all the postseason things being decided already. All right, so speaking of postseason, we've got district singles and doubles, gonna be at McCos Park. That's number one, a huge thumbs up. But then number two, Atlantic's gonna be your opponent in the postseason for team and that's also McCos Park. So Jed, couple of nice feathers in the cap. Everybody's got to come here. Yeah, you know, state's gonna go through McCos Park again. And so we're really excited that that's happening again. And we felt like we've got two really good draws there. We feel like we have a solid district to get multiple entries into the individual state tournament. And then we also feel we have a good path to make a 10th consecutive trip to team state as well. So we'll have to most likely beat a solid ballard team who we were 3-3 with after singles when we played in the regular season. So they're no cakewalk by any means. We'll need to show up and compete. But there is a, at least we're gonna be at home and on our familiar courts. And we're gonna have an opportunity to do that again. So the guys are really excited about both postings. So again, that's a testament to the work that they've put in and the things that they've kept grinding through. We've just really kept going through adversity this year and just really just kept moving forward, asking guys to play up and do things that weren't necessarily what we expected they'd be doing. But it's been, everybody stayed positive and we've just kind of kept moving forward. So if we can have that attitude, I think there's some good things here at the stretch of the finish here. Well, Jed, as always, thank you so much for some time. Best of luck here as you guys get ready for post-season into post-season. We'll talk to you again real soon. Sounds good. Thanks a lot. You bet, Jed Hammond again joining us. Boon Boys Tennis here on Coach's Corner.
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