An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
The USTA NTRP National Championships are officially in the books. The tournament included players who received endorsements for the Covid cancelled tournament in 2020 as well as new competitors who qualified for the event in 2021. The Singles brackets were played 9-12 April with 18+ in Surprise, AZ and 50+ in Orlando, FL. The doubles brackets were played 16-19 April with 18+ in Surprise, AZ, and 50+ in San Diego.
Timing is everything. Michael Dowse took the reins of the USTA in January of 2020. With all that has happened in the interim, it is kind of easy to lose track of the fact that he had only been in his new position for 70 days before the pandemic became the mother of all complicating factors.
don’t want to pile on. Issues with the deployment of the USTA’s new digital application development platform continue to roll in. “Harsh Realities Revealed in the USTA Digital Platform Update” which went live on March 8, detailed some to the issues including the fact that players entering doubles events in USTA tournaments under the new platform have no way to indicate who their partner will be. Issues with the new system continue to roll in.
The USPTA released preliminary financial data for 2020 in the April edition of ADDVantage magazine. In a summary introduction of the information, USPTA CEO John R Embree indicated that it was shared in an effort to be fully transparent about the financial performance of the organization. This same data will eventually be publicly available once the USPTA’s IRS Form 990 goes on record. It is commendable that the USPTA is has delivered a summary of the organization’s finances in a reader friendly format directly to its membership. Most people are not aware that IRS 990s are public data and even fewer ever bother to take a look at them.
2020 was a year of difficult decisions. One of the myriad of problems the USTA was confronted with last year was what to do with player NTRP ratings. Due to shutdowns and closures due to the pandemic, the volume of matches did not achieve the numbers required to reliably make the NTRP calculation. The USTA statement that announced the decision that ratings would not be updated at the end of 2020 first declared the NTRP system to be fundamentally sound. (Cough.) The move was characterized as a difficult decision. I am sure it was.
The USTA sent an email to all playing members on March 5. That message contained an important update on the status of the deployment of the new digital platform, Serve Tennis. An identical news story was simultaneously released to the USTA web site. In typical USTA fashion, the subject line of “Competitive Pathway,” as well as leading off with some “rah-rah” news of PAC report tennis participation data, buries the lead. Additionally, the message any conveyed optimistic statements about how awesome the new competitive pathway is going to be for tennis players before getting to the crux of the issue.
Tennis players who pay any attention to current news are inundated with frequent articles touting the health benefits of playing the sport. The fact that tennis players have more positive health measures is backed up by reputable independent research data. A couple of weeks ago, the USTA issued a press release that illustrates that point. It pointed to “one of the largest tennis-specific studies performed to date.” Today we are taking a look at the report summarizing that research.
“Tennis is the perfect social-distancing sport—and the numbers continue to prove it.” That is the first line from a USTA news article last week touting an increase in tennis participation in the United States. The headline of the same press release is “U.S. tennis participation surges in 2020, Physical Activity Council (PAC) report finds.” So what exactly is the PAC and what is in that report?
This is a great week to pay a virtual visit to the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Many readers in the United States are likely to be snowed in today. There is no better time to curl up under a blanket and transport yourself to a different place in time. The curators at the International Tennis Hall of Fame are serving up the perfect fare for Black History Month.
A couple of week’s ago, the USTA sent an email last week with a link to a survey directed to all League Players. Last Monday, “Surveying USTA League Tennis: Captain’s Edition” described the questions from the survey that were directed only to players who have captained a team. Today our attention shifts to the survey questions targeted at the entire USTA League playing population.