I thought I was done breaking down the rules implications stemming from the NTRP National Championships last week. However, a reader from Intermountain pointed out an ambiguity in the selection process for Mixed Doubles. It is probably something I should have noticed earlier. The 18+ Mixed Doubles entries don’t close until March 16, so there is an opportunity to correct the ambiguity before that closes.
As I described in a previous post, new “Doubles Selection Criteria for the NTRP National Championships” will be used in 2025.
For doubles the top combined NSL will be selected.
2025 NTRP National Championships Selection Criteria, 1.b.iv
For clarity, the USTA’s selection criteria document provides a specific example. If Player A is ranked #1, Player B is Ranked #74, Player C is ranked #5, and Player D is ranked #10, then a team consisting of players C and D would have a combined NSL of #15 and be selected before players A and B who would have a combined NSL of #75. In other words, a highly ranked player can no longer expect to get into the tournament if they select a partner who hasn’t enjoyed much tournament success.
That makes it clear that selection will be based on the combined positional ranking rather than combined total ranking points. When I wrote that summary description in the paragraph above, I left out the final sentence of that part of the USTA’s Selection Criteria document. That final sentence, which is specific to Mixed Doubles, reads as follows:
For Mixed Doubles, the top combined NSL will also be listed using the NSL from the Men’s and Women’s Mixed Doubles lists.
2025 NTRP National Championships Selection Criteria, 1.b.iv
The USTA digital infrastructure maintains separate ranking lists for the men and the women. Based on that description, I believe the intended implementation would use those existing NSL lists to perform the calculation. However, the 2025 NTRP National Championships FAQ injects a contradictory interpretation.
Q: There is a Men’s and Women’s Mixed Doubles National Standings List. Which list will be used to
2025 NTRP National Championships FAQ
determine who is selected if my section uses the National Standings List for selection?
A: The Tournament organizers will manually combine the Men’s and Women’s list and select the top
players from both lists combined. For example, if the Men’s List has John Doe (1345 points) and Bobby
Lee (465 points) and the Women’s List has Jane Smith (1645 points) and Susie Jones (765 points) then
the order of selection will be as follows: Jane Smith (1645), John Doe (1345), Susie Jones (765), Bobby
Lee (465).
I suspect that this part of the FAQ was accidentally left over from the selection criteria used for the 2024 tournament. The best way to clean this up would be to simply delete that Q&A from the FAQ. The Selection Criteria outlined in 1.b.iv is unambiguous if that clause is removed from the FAQ.
Apparently, that wasn’t enough overthinking for me. I took a peek at the specific example provided in the reader’s comment. Intermountain has three guaranteed qualification spots and four teams currently on the entry list for the 18+ 4.5 Mixed division at the 2025 NTRP National Championships. Based on the rankings lists as of 2/26/2025, the most recent ones when I wrote this post, selection would calculate out to the same order using any of the three methods that could potentially be argued based on the contradictory wording between the Selection Criteria and FAQ documents.
To summarize those three methods, the first combines the NSL positions to determine the selection order. The other two methods would work off a manually merged unified NSL for Mixed. The second method would take the merged NSL and then combine each partner’s position into a combined NSL total for selection. The third method would be to select a single player based on position in the NSL regardless of where their partner was ranked, which is exactly what the FAQ says. An image of the table with those calculations is included at the end of this post.
A lot can change between now and when player selection is made. I took a peek at the rankings list to make sure that Mixed Doubles points earned from the NTRP National Championships last year weren’t going to fall off player records, which could have a seismic impact. Additionally, all this was probably an academic exercise because at the time of this writing, only 15 players had entered the tournament, representing eight teams. Unless a bunch of entries come rolling in as the deadline approaches, I am pretty sure all four Intermountain teams will get into the draw unless a decision is made to arbitrarily truncate participation to make the round robin pools work out better. There are supposed to be 32 teams in a “full” bracket for this division.
Understanding the selection process is crucial for players seeking to qualify for entry-constrained events. Ultimately, this ambiguity in the Mixed Doubles selection process is worth correcting. While the practical impact is unlikely to matter in this particular year, ideally getting into this tournament should be highly competitive. Consequently, it should matter.
- 2025 NTRP National Championships Selection Criteria, USTA web-published resource, undated and no version markings.
- 2025 NTRP National Championships FAQ, USTA web-published resource, undated and no version markings.
- 2025 NTRP National Championships Fact Sheet, USTA web-published resource, undated and no version markings.
- USTA About NTRP National Championships, USTA web page, viewer January 18, 2025.
