Playthrough #2

Okay so it's fall portal time and I need to decide who I want to bolster in the D1 ranks.

It would be easier to bring a bunch of 50+ STR players, take over a doormat D1 program and start running up wins and make NCAA tournaments, but I think that'd just be a race towards figuring out the deal to crack into the upper echelons of things, which will be a fun challenge when I get there.

What I'd like to do first, at least for a season or two, is become a dominant conference power first. The trick to that would be obviously recruiting better than average players for a league and then keep them through cycles, then you lose, never truly able to compete at the higher levels. I actually know how that game looks, you can always reach a certain point, but calibrating what your level is in an landscape where the talent seems to always be getting better is tricky.

Doing this for one team is not that interesting, to be honest, because I've already proven that you can beat better teams that you can outrecruit pretty easily. Since i don't control freshmen intake only transfer portals, it'll be far more like a modern recruiting game than a normal college sports game, but I guess that's more realistic.

I could get into budgets and start keeping track of math -- the game doesn't right now -- but I'm mostly doing this to see how the seasons stack, how the game feels and so forth.

So what I'm thinking is the best way to simulate that is to 1) start redirecting recruits before they start in the Fall season so that I start paying attention to the recruits around the country/world 2) develop several theories to test including 2a) can you build a roster of all-americans and win a national title? 2b) can you build a roster of only high school recruits and win a title? 3) can you win without signing any former pro players? 4) can you recruit a team of in-state/in-region players and be competitive? 5) in the lower divisions, what's the lowest STR-level roster you can assemble to win a title?

I can imagine at some future state, the thing to do here would be to treat college tennis like the EPL where teams have affiliates, players move up and down based on those agreements and we can develop benchwarmers at the lower levels and watch their rise.

So lots of good ideas here to keep me busy thinking through how the sim works gameplaywise over the next few weeks/months.