Last Sunday, I stumbled across an anomaly in USTA League TennisLink standings calculations. This all happened because I subjected myself to a tortuous self-indulgent exercise that proved something I instinctively already knew. Had I managed to win my final match, my team would have reached the Finals of the Texas Sectional Championships. While beating myself up over that topic, I stumbled across what I believe is a genuine math or logic error in how the TennisLink software calculates the standings for one particular edge case.
The following table shows the actual final results as they appear on the official TennisLink page for “Flight 2” of the USTA Texas 4.5 Women’s Sectionals. The last column is the games won percentage. The Fort Worth team’s value is highlighted in red because 148 games won and 106 games lost should be 58.26% rather than 61.16%.
| Team Name | Team Score | Indiv. Score | Sets | Games | * Games Won % | ||||
| Wins* | Losses | Wins | Losses | Won | Lost | Won | Lost | ||
| Houston | 3 | 0 | 11 | 4 | 22 | 8 | 154 | 110 | 56.35% |
| Wild Dallas | 2 | 1 | 7 | 8 | 16 | 18 | 131 | 148 | 46.95% |
| Fort Worth | 1 | 2 | 9 | 6 | 18 | 12 | 148 | 106 | 61.16% (?) |
| San Antonio | 0 | 3 | 3 | 12 | 8 | 26 | 98 | 167 | 36.98% |
I highlighted the discrepancy in my first draft of last Sunday’s post and noted that someone at the USTA should look into it. As it turns out, I am way too OCD to just drop it like that. After playing around with the numbers for a bit, it was apparent that reducing the total games played value in Fort Worth’s denominator by 12 yielded the anomalous percentage calculation. In other words, Fort Worth was “credited” with playing 12 games fewer than were recorded.
That actually gave me a pretty good idea of what was happening in the software. Fort Worth had to default a match Saturday morning because one of our players was too sick to play. A USTA League Regulation indicates how the match is supposed to be scored when that happens.
2.03J Scoring of Individual Defaults. For the purpose of determining standings, individual defaults will be scored as a 6-0, 6-0 win for the player or doubles team receiving the default and a 0-6, 0-6 loss for the player or doubles team that defaulted the match. In the event of a default by both players or doubles teams, both sides will be given a 0-6, 0-6 loss and neither receives credit for a win. If a double default results in a tie, the tiebreak procedure shall be the same as in Reg. 2.03H Procedures In the Event of a Tie in order to determine a winner of that team match.
USTA League Regulation 2.03J, Scoring of Individual Defaults, USTA League Regulations and USTA Texas Operating Procedures 2024.
Our defaulted match was correctly recorded as a 6-0, 6-0 score per the USTA League Regulations. Houston was credited with winning the 12 games they earned off that default. However, although those games appear in the “Lost” column, they apparently did not count against Fort Worth and were excluded from the percentage of the games won calculation.
USTA League Regulations do not specify or suggest that the games “Lost” in a defaulted line are excluded from the calculation of the percentage of games won. Additionally, I see no logical reason to omit them. In fact, if a team is playing against another with an extremely strong singles line that they believe will yield a lop-sided score, it is beneficial to default the match. Doing so actually improves the defaulting team’s tie-break criteria. That’s just wrong.
USTA League should not have rules or Regulations incentivizing teams to default matches. If defaulted matches are intentionally excluded from the calculations, the Regulations must explicitly state that. One way or another, I think it’s a mistake.
- 2024 USTA League National Regulations and Texas Operating Procedures, USTA Texas Resource, viewed June 15, 2024.
Since I have been playing league, I always understood the winning percentage to be games won out of all games actually played.
Yes. Are you saying the calculations done by USTA are correct or incorrect? I’m not exactly sure what you mean.
The team that won the default court 6-0, 6-0 is still technically winning 12 games and losing 0 games for that match regardless if the match was actually played or not. But like Teresa said in her article, this doesn’t make sense to reward a team(her team) for not even playing this one particular match.
Yea, this is messed up if those 12 games don’t count against your team. I know the percentages with this software in the past have often been inaccurate, but maybe they’re fixed now.
From seeing all this, I believe it’s a software problem. In the standings, your team is correctly credited with 148 games won and 106 games lost, which is a games won % of 58.27%. So, what I’m seeing is they’re counting those 12 games lost, but the software doesn’t understand what to do if it sees a default or something not doesn’t say the match is completed.
Also, using sets lost and games lost should be eliminated. It’s more accurate and better to go by % sets won and % games won. But, also even if using sets lost and games lost, why is the next criterion % games won and not % sets won? Depending on how many teams are involved in a tiebreak scenario, fighting for an extra game at the end of set and losing 5-7 instead of 4-6 could actually be a detriment, but if it’s a %, it would help you. It doesn’t make sense if you do better and it hurts you. Or if your opps retire in the 1st set at 5-0. They only lose 1st set in the end instead of likely 2 sets if they played out the match or retired in the 2nd set. But I guess this last example still would only be 1 set either way as far as I can tell. Which really, if someone retires in the 1st set, their opps should be credited with 2 sets still.