LaGrange High’s Kenny Moore helps influence major GHSA changes
Published 11:28 am Wednesday, April 2, 2025
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GHSA has made some tweaks to the 2025 high school tennis season, and LaGrange High coach Kenny Moore has been at the heart of it. The long-serving Granger coach (32 years and counting) brought a series of proposals to GHSA in 2024 with two major changes on his mind: 1) no ad scoring and 2) moving the final four back to a neutral site.
The first rule change centered around what happened in a scenario when two players (or two sets of players) get into a deuce (40-40). Under the previous rule, the two opposing teams/players would play until one won by two scores. Now, whoever wins the opening point after a deuce will win the game.
“In the previous rule, you had to win by two,” Moore said. “No ad was introduced back when I was in college.
“So like, if you’re serving, I get my choice of where you’re going to serve in doubles, we get our choice of who receives it, and then that point wins. That’s the game point. So that’s a pretty radical change from last year,” he added.
The thought behind no-ad scoring is that it will expedite play and limit the number of long-drawn-out games that are played.
Moore saw that the teams in Alabama were doing no ad scoring and decided that it could be a good fit for teams in Georgia as well.
The championship matches for GHSA have regularly been played all at the same time at the same location. That used to be true of the Final Four as well, but over the years, that has gone away. Moore wanted to bring back those Final Four atmosphere and has led GHSA to do just that.
“We used to play the semifinals on one day and then the finals the next day,” Moore said. “So, I really wanted them to reinstitute the neutral site Final Four.”
This season, the semifinals and finals will be played in Rome on May 10 for all classifications.
Moore pounded the ground and did some grassroots work to figure out where everybody else in the high school tennis world was regarding these potential changes.
“I reached out to every tennis coach I could think of and asked them what they thought of this, and there were a few against it, but for the most part, I got strong support,” Moore said.
Even with these major changes implemented, Moore is not done yet campaigning for change. One of his major ideas was tabled for a year, but he hopes it will gain traction heading into 2026.
“I actually pitched another idea that got tabled for a year about moving the region tournament back a week, which I think would really help us work around spring break,” he said.
Moore’s strong work with the GHSA over the last year has seen the veteran leader earn the GHSA Tennis Coach of the Year and USTA High School Coach of the Year. Moore currently sits at 998 wins as the head coach of the boys and girls tennis teams at LaGrange High.