The Men’s and Women’s Individual Regional Tournaments will remain 16-entry draws in both singles and doubles. This is the same format as in previous years. However, starting this fall, berths to the Individual Regional Tournaments will no longer be distributed to conferences, but will be awarded based on pre-regional qualifying events.
What are Pre-Regionals?
The Pre-Regional is a one round of qualifying for the regionals.
There are three ways for a player (or doubles team) to get to the Regional Tournament.
- By being in a region with eight tennis-playing schools or fewer, in which case, every school will send two singles and two doubles directly to the regional tournament.
- By being seeded at the Pre-Regional highly enough to receive a bye, and thus, automatically qualifying for the Regional Tournament.
- By winning a Pre-Regional match
Format
If a region has eight or fewer tennis-playing schools, then Pre-Regionals are not needed because the regional field is already at 16 or fewer entries. If, however, the region has nine or more tennis-playing schools, then the Pre-Regionals are needed to reduce the field to sixteen.
Each region has been divided into two Pre-Regional pools, based primarily on geography and, to a lesser extent, conference assignment. Click here for the complete report of Pre-Regional Assignments. There is a Pre-Regional Berth Chart 1 (See below to determine how many qualifiers each pool can bring to the regional tournament.
Timing and Seeding
On Saturday morning, October 4th (Women) and April 18th (Men), the Pre-Regional Directors will conduct their seeding meetings online, using Zoom or Google Meet. Pre-Regional Directors and Sites are determined by the NCHSTA. If you would like to volunteer to host or direct (or both), or if you would like to recommend someone else for those roles, please complete this Volunteer/Recommendation form.
At that meeting, the coaches will seed the Pre-Regional bracket, seeding one entry for each berth at stake. The unseeded players will be drawn, randomly, to play against the lowest-seeded players, with the provision that no one will have to play a teammate. Players seeded highly enough to receive a bye will automatically advance to the Regional and do not have to attend the Pre-Regional event.
Play
The default date for play would be October 6th (Women) and April 20th (Men), at 4 pm, (Pre-Regionals may be played on another date or time during that week if mutually agreed upon by all schools in that Regional Pool). The players will play their matches using the state individual tournament format of best two-of-three sets, with the third set played in full, for both singles and doubles. The winners advance to the Regional Tournaments.
How to Determine How Many Regional Berths My Pre-Regional Will Receive
The number of berths your Pre-Regional will receive depends on the number of schools in your Pre-Regional that field tennis teams that season, compared to those in the other Pre-Regional of your region (see pools in Pre-Regional assignments). Chart 1 below shows how the berths will be assigned.
Chart 1
To use the chart, simply find the row for the number of teams assigned to your Pre-Regional, and trace across to the column for the number of teams assigned to the other Pre-Regional in your region. The number at the intersection of the row and column will indicate the number of berths assigned to your Pre-Regional.
Chart 2
In Chart 2 below, suppose your Pre-Regional has seven teams, and the other Pre-Regional has only five teams. In this case, your Pre-Regional would receive nine berths, and the other Pre-Regional would receive seven, as shown below.
