This question might seem an odd one. After all, why is this really a question? Shouldn’t all kids play for their school teams, if they are good enough? 

The short answer is: yes. Of course! If your child is good enough to make the team, what better way to give back and show some school spirit than to represent the school in a sport your child loves?

But the real answer is more complicated, and is yet one more way tennis is unique.

The first thing to be aware of is that playing high school tennis has almost nothing to do with college recruiting. If you are interested in playing at the collegiate level, it may be helpful for you to know that athletes are not being recruited based on how they perform in high school matches. It’s not like football or basketball, for example, where college coaches come to watch games, attend practices, and watch videos to get a view of whether the player is good enough to make the squad. And there are a few reasons for this.

First, with the emergence of UTR, there is now a far more accurate way to know the level of any high school aged tennis player. Similar to swimming or track, where the athlete’s performance can be quantified, the UTR in tennis is a far more accurate guage of a player’s competitiveness than watching them play in matches. It has become so prevalent, in fact, that most college coaches will start with a player’s UTR to understand overall viability in a program before taking the next steps like watching them compete in a tournament or interviewing them.

Second, there are well-organized junior national tennis tournaments, like Easter Bowl, Orange Bowl, Kalamazoo, etc. that does a good job of gathering all of the top juniors into a single event. College coaches often attend these tournaments with specific players in mind to come and watch. And you definitely do not need to be on a high school team to get into these tournaments.

Third, as anyone who has spent much time playing tennis knows, it is very hard to improve unless you play against others who are better than you. At a minimum, you need to play someone who is at the same level as you, and even that won’t always lead to improvements.

Because of all of these factors, the kids who play for their high schools will be all over the place. The level of play in high school can be different from one tennis team to the next. Add to it the fact that tennis team rosters are pretty small (14 or 15 kids at the max), and so the impact of one player can be large for the entire team. If just a handful of the kids on the roster are not playing at a high level, the matches for that team will be very lopsided, and if your child is one of the higher performers, they might not improve from practicing with the team either.

These dynamics can sometimes make it hard to know whether joining the team would be good or bad. And as crazy as it might sound, because kids have such little free time in high school, you always need to make sure you are using that precious time as effectively as possible.  With all that being said, here are some factors to consider:

• Look at the team roster and see if there at least a handful of players who are at the same level as your child. If so, you at least know the team practices will be challenging for your kid and improve his tennis skill.
• Look at the caliber of the teams your child will be playing against and apply the same filter. If the league is stacked with high performing, dedicated competitors, there is a better chance of your child getting good matches and improving.
• Remember that improving tennis is not the only thing that matters. Being part of a team has far deeper consequences than winning or losing. Tennis is notoriously hard, precisely because it is an individual sport, so when there is a chance to be part of a team, it can rejuvenate a kid’s love for the game, take away some of that intense game-time pressure, and build lifelong friendships. In most cases, this is worth the tradeoff of lowering your tennis level for a few months.
• Tennis team participation is also a chance for leadership. If you are factoring in tennis as an extracurricular for college admissions, then being part of the team (and maybe even taking on a leadership role, like team captain) may actually be more important than the tennis level the kid reaches.

High school tennis is unusual because of the unique factors of the sport itself, such as improvement through similar leveled players and how the college recruitment process works. Hopefully, this article gives some helpful insights in terms of the factors to consider.