An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
Data integrity issues surface over Novak Djokovic’s positive Covid test, the “Barty Party” fuels a participation spike in Australia, and Danielle Collins plays the AO finals without a clothing or shoe contract.
NTRP tournaments are an important part of the adult tennis ecosystem. Implemented correctly, it is a developmental pipeline for players to improve their competitive level and potentially even advance to a level of performance that leads to participation in age-group Open events. At the same time, NTRP tournaments are a participation drain on Senior age group Open tournament play. This post outlines how NTRP tennis should be integrated into the USTA “unified” tournament framework to maximize the benefits while minimizing the downside. Spoiler alert: There is no perfect solution.
Conducting National Championships is woven into the very fiber of the USTA’s existence. When the organization was confronted with the problem of declining participation in tournaments and focused on increasing play at NTRP events, the most natural “solution” was creation of a National Championship. As soon as a tournament is designated as a “National Championship,” it is also almost a foregone conclusion that it will be Level 1 in the USTA framework. Unfortunately, that sequence of completely logical thought breaks the rankings pyramid and hurts the overall tournament ecosystem.
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USTA tennis tournaments are played under a 7 tier unified framework. As previously discussed on this site, unification between the Adult and Junior system pretty much stops past the description that the framework has 7 tiers. The USTA tournament regulations that govern Adult and Junior play are separate and distinctly different documents. There is also divergence between Adult age group tennis and the Adult NTRP tournament system even though they co-exist within the same regulations. When NTRP tournaments were layered in to the existing Adult age group open system, it created a square peg and round hole situation.
One of the unexpected benefits of writing this blog has been my discovery of the greatness of wheelchair tennis. When Dylan Alcott announced that the 2022 Australian Open will mark his retirement from competition, I knew that I would be reviewing his recently updated autobiography as “Australian Summer of Tennis” draws to a close. This compulsory read turned out to be a compulsory read: I finished the book in a single sitting.
In the second round of the Australian Open, Pablo Carreno Busta hit an unusual “around the net post” winner against Tallon Griekspoor. It is a perfect example that highlights one of the more obscure rules of tennis. In fact, it is a rules interpretation that the ESPN announcer didn’t get exactly right.
I played a tournament last October at the Mission Hills Country Club. The COVID postponed BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells was going on at the same time. One morning WTA player Desirae Krawczyk and her doubles partner Alexa Guarachi strolled into the club for a practice session. Naturally, I watched their workout with rapt attention. They played the classic doubles practice game “Dingles!” against their coaches.
Malcolm Gladwell penned a powerful essay praising the WTA response to the Peng Shuai crisis, ESPN drops the ball on a significant match at the Australian Open, and other stories from the margins of the tennis world.
Tennis on Campus was started by the USTA in 2000 as a way to capture the thousands of former Junior tennis players who had moved onto college, but not onto one of the limited spots on their collegiate tennis team. The program is managed by the USTA in cooperation with the National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association. It was supposed to be an important mechanism to bridge former Junior players into Adult tennis.
For years the USTA has obsessed about low participation of players between 20-40 years old. There is a “bathtub” shaped curve as participation plummets when players age out of Juniors tennis. The numbers don’t recover until after people turn 40. From a marketing perspective, it is a disaster because that demographic is where disposable income lives. It is also bad for overall participation because many people don’t ever return to the tennis ecosystem.