The USTA Regulations include detailed procedures specifying the placement of byes for tournament brackets that don’t attract enough entries to fill out the division. When an event is seeded, the byes are awarded to the top players on a priority basis. In essence, players receive byes as a reward for a history of high performance prior to the tournament.
However, the USTA also has a policy that makes it clear that a player cannot receive ranking points simply for receiving a bye.
Byes. A player who advances because of a bye does not receive ranking points for advancing.
USTA Adult and Family Tournament, Ranking, & Sanctioning Regulations, IX.F.3.a
This is a necessary Regulation. Without it, it would be theoretically possible for a player to maintain a high ranking in perpetuity simply by entering tournaments and collecting free points awarded from byes.
Consequently, a player who receives a bye has to win a subsequent match in a bracketed tournament to earn rankings points. In the standard bracketed format, a player who receives a bye ultimately earns points based on how far they ultimately advance in the draw. A top-seeded player isn’t penalized for receiving a bye in standard brackets. That isn’t the case for all formats, however.
This weekend I have been dissecting the current implementation of the two-stage tournament format used at the USTA’s NTRP National Championship. In a nutshell, the competition starts with a preliminary Round Robin, which is followed by a secondary stage featuring cascading bracketed play.
Depending on the number of players who register for the tournament, byes may be unavoidable in the second stage. That isn’t an issue, per se. However, the way that the USTA Adult and Family Tournament Ranking System handles those byes is a primary cause of ranking point inequities for that specific format.
I will once again use the 13-player Women’s 4.5 Singles division from this year’s 18+ NTRP National Championships to illustrate what happens. In that division, six players were advanced to the Championship bracket from three preliminary Round Robin groups. That means that two byes were required to fill in the remaining open spots on the 8-player bracket.
There is some question about how to fairly slot those six players into the bracket along with the byes. Additionally, what constitutes “Fair” requires an idea of whether receiving a bye is a benefit or a penalty. The USTA Adult and Family Tournament, Ranking, & Sanctioning Regulations go to great lengths to specify how to ensure that byes go to the strongest players. In essence, byes are usually regarded as a benefit or a reward in the tournament culture.
However, the points assigned in the “Round Robin Preliminary Rounds & SE Draw of 8 Playoff” table from the USTA Adult and Family Tournament Ranking System penalizes the players who receive a bye during the secondary bracket stage. The only way for a player to earn the full allocation of points is to play and win the maximum number of matches that any player might play during the Championship rounds. The players who receive a bye do not have a chance to do that because they play fewer matches.
It is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if the current implementation is a misinterpretation of USTA Regulation IX.F.3.a. It may be constraining the perceived solution set. That would possibly explain why the committee that oversees these ranking tables keeps overlooking the most efficient way to fix what is obviously a serious problem with this innovative format of play.
Here is an alternative way to think about it. The players who receive a bye in the Championship Rounds should be awarded it due to their superior performance in the initial stage of the competition. In essence, they earn the secondary bye. That does not violate the spirit and intent of USTA Regulation IX.F.3.a, which exists to prevent players from receiving “free” points.
Unfortunately, examining the Championship bracket from the 13-player Women’s 18+ 4.5 Singles division at this year’s tournament makes it pretty clear that the byes were not awarded to the top players from the initial stages. A performance-based system for slotting players would have resulted in two of the three undefeated players receiving the byes. It didn’t happen.
It is also apparent that the players were randomly placed in the draw with one tiny caveat. The players who emerged from the same Round Robin group were placed in corresponding positions on opposite sides of the brackets. That ensures that those players who have already met head-to-head will not do so again unless they both make the finals. That is obviously a good thing to do.
Byes should be awarded to the players who exhibited the highest performance during the preliminary Round Robin stage. That determination can be made on the basis of who won the most matches, or the highest percentage of sets, or the highest percentage of games.
That eliminates any reasonable rationale for reducing those players’ points in the secondary bracketed stage. It might clear the way to move to the best solution for an equitable points distribution policy based on order-of-finish rather than points-per-round.
In our example from this year’s tournament, the two players who received byes in the Championship bracket finished no worse than fourth. Consequently, those byes should be awarded for performance rather than randomly allocated. It is perfectly fine for players to earn ranking points associated with their final position in the order of play IF they earned it during their preliminary Round Robin matches.
It Really Matters
It is absurd for a player to win every single match at a tournament yet not receive the full number of ranking points for winning the Championship. It is equally crazy that the points awarded to each player in this tournament format have no consistent correlation to the actual order of finish. The inherent problem isn’t in the matches played but in how ranking points are allocated. That is an administrative issue.
The USTA created the unified National Rankings System, and the Level 1 NTRP Championships, to incentivize players to engage in tournaments. The ranking system is the metric that fuels that pursuit. The USTA says that the ranking system is important. However, not promptly addressing the problems unintentionally communicates that the organization doesn’t really believe that.
The problem is that players will eventually also start to believe the rankings aren’t important. When that happens, the complaints will disappear… along with the players that the system was designed to attract in the first place.
In the immortal words of *NSYNC, “It ain’t no lie, baby, bye, bye, bye.”
(Please fix the bye issue.)
- 2023 USTA Adult Tournaments Ranking System, USTA hosted document, last viewed April 28, 2023.
- USTA Adult and Family Tournament, Ranking, & Sanctioning Regulations, USTA Regulation, as amended July 31, 2021. (Editorial note: Assumed to be current. This is the one off the USTA “About Adult Tournaments” page.)
- Friend at Court: The Handbook of Tennis Rules and Regulations, USTA, 2023
