I received a text last Monday from a player asking if I had heard the hilarious story about what happened to his team over the weekend at the 40+ Dallas City Championships. That USTA League playoff event determines which teams represent DTA at Sectionals later this spring. While I had not heard a hint of any drama emerging over the weekend, I was naturally very interested.
He also provided a picture of his team posing with the Champions banner and hoisting the engraved stainless steel jugs handed out to the winning teams. As a semi-relevant aside, that same weekend, I also stood with my team behind that same banner just a few steps away from where their photo was taken. I am not ordinarily excited about USTA League Championship swag, but the jugs from this year are very nice.
Tragically, at least from that team’s perspective, they didn’t win the event. A couple of hours after their “victory” photo was taken, the players were notified that they had not won and were directed to return their jugs to the playing site so they could be given to the team that actually advanced.
So what happened? The player who put me onto the story didn’t know why the result was reversed. One potential way the scenario could have occurred was a misapplication of the tie-break procedures in the team standings. However, TennisLink indicated that the flight had a clear winner, and that was the team that eventually prevailed.
That meant that an individual team matchup had been reversed. It didn’t take me much time to find the one in question. It was the final round robin meeting between the first and second-place teams, who were each 2-0 going in. In effect, it was a winner-takes-all Finals. The scorecard is an epic example of a tied match that went deep into the tie-break criteria.
The matches were split evenly at 2-2, all matches were straight set wins, and each team won the exact same number of games. In this case, the final tie-break criterion is the winner of the line one doubles matchup.
Since TennisLink calculated the winner correctly based on the relevant tie-break procedures, it was still a mystery why the second-place team was initially declared the winner. To me, a plausible explanation could have been that one of the match scores had been initially reported or entered into TennisLink incorrectly. I reached out to the Captain of the deposed team on what he had been officially told, expecting to hear a story along those lines. Had that been the case, this post would have concluded with the importance of requiring both Captains to double-check and sign off on the scorecard, a practice that is apparently no longer required in DTA playoffs. That remains a topic for a future post.
Instead, I was treated to an even stranger tale. The Captains of both teams agreed that the wrong team had won. I was told that the tie-break criteria were recently changed, but I don’t think that is actually the case. With both Captains in erroneous agreement on the result, the tournament desk was convinced to take the traditional Champions photo and hand out the winner’s swag. I assume that the discrepancy was detected only when the scorecard from the match was transposed into TennisLink.
At some point in the future, I need to do a full rules trace for the tie-break scenarios for the four match format because that is an interesting journey of omission. However, to quickly bring this post to closure, here is the relevant tie-break procedure excerpted from DTA’s Local League Regulations:
For a 4-line, if tied 2-2, the tie shall be broken by the first of the following methods to do so:
USTA League Local Rules and Regulations, Dallas Tennis Association, 2025 Championship Year, Regulation 9C.
(a). Sets: Loser of the fewest number of sets.
(b). Games: Loser of the fewest number of games.
(c). Game Winning Percentage: Total games won divided by total games played.
(d). Line 1 Doubles.
My theory on what happened is that the game winning percentage was misinterpreted. I have written in the past that it is mathematically impossible for two teams to lose the same number of games head-to-head, which is criterion b, yet somehow have a different game winning percentage for criterion c. That may have led people to think it applies to the game winning percentage from the overall team standings rather than just the immediate match, but that is clearly not the intent. In this particular case, the team that came in second had a much higher games winning percentage across the playoff weekend, so that would be a plausible logical throughline.
For the team that ultimately prevailed, this is a tennis resurrection story. They thought they had lost, and their season was over. Instead, they live to compete another day at Sectionals. That is potentially huge because the teams representing Dallas are always serious contenders to win Sectionals and advance to the National Championships.
In the end, the most remarkable part of this entire saga might be the reaction of the displaced team relegated from believing they had won into second place. Rather than harboring resentment or frustration, they seem to have taken the reversal in stride, with good humor and a healthy dose of sportsmanship. In a situation ripe for drama, their grace under disappointment is admirable. Given the circumstances, that’s the best possible outcome.
- USTA League Local Rules and Regulations, Dallas Tennis Association, for the 2025 Championship Year.
