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Making NTRP Tournaments Work

On By Teresa Merklin

NTRP tournaments are an important part of the adult tennis ecosystem. Implemented correctly, it is a developmental pipeline for players to improve their competitive level and potentially even advance to a level of performance that leads to participation in age-group Open events. At the same time, NTRP tournaments are a participation drain on Senior age group Open tournament play. This post outlines how NTRP tennis should be integrated into the USTA “unified” tournament framework to maximize the benefits while minimizing the downside. Spoiler alert: There is no perfect solution.

NTRP National Championships: You Want That Supersized?

On By Teresa Merklin

Conducting National Championships is woven into the very fiber of the USTA’s existence. When the organization was confronted with the problem of declining participation in tournaments and focused on increasing play at NTRP events, the most natural “solution” was creation of a National Championship. As soon as a tournament is designated as a “National Championship,” it is also almost a foregone conclusion that it will be Level 1 in the USTA framework. Unfortunately, that sequence of completely logical thought breaks the rankings pyramid and hurts the overall tournament ecosystem.

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NTRP vs Competitive Pathway

On By Teresa Merklin

USTA tennis tournaments are played under a 7 tier unified framework. As previously discussed on this site, unification between the Adult and Junior system pretty much stops past the description that the framework has 7 tiers. The USTA tournament regulations that govern Adult and Junior play are separate and distinctly different documents. There is also divergence between Adult age group tennis and the Adult NTRP tournament system even though they co-exist within the same regulations. When NTRP tournaments were layered in to the existing Adult age group open system, it created a square peg and round hole situation.

Tennis on Campus is not the Solution

On By Teresa Merklin

Tennis on Campus was started by the USTA in 2000 as a way to capture the thousands of former Junior tennis players who had moved onto college, but not onto one of the limited spots on their collegiate tennis team. The program is managed by the USTA in cooperation with the National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association. It was supposed to be an important mechanism to bridge former Junior players into Adult tennis.

Marketing Adult Tennis to Juniors

On By Teresa Merklin

For years the USTA has obsessed about low participation of players between 20-40 years old. There is a “bathtub” shaped curve as participation plummets when players age out of Juniors tennis. The numbers don’t recover until after people turn 40. From a marketing perspective, it is a disaster because that demographic is where disposable income lives. It is also bad for overall participation because many people don’t ever return to the tennis ecosystem.

Truth Bomb: The USTA Hates Senior Tennis

On By Teresa Merklin

At the Cotton Bowl tournament over the holidays, I had an interesting conversation with someone who is a “near sider” to the USTA organization. That person dropped this truth bomb on me: The USTA thinks that the lack of participation in the 20-40 year old demographic is because younger players don’t want to play with older players. That’s right Seniors… the USTA is blaming you for the historic lack of participation in the younger demographic.

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Leveling Up: Sectional Championships

On By Teresa Merklin

ONE thing you can learn from the USTA official landing page for the Adult tournament structure is that ONE is a very important concept. That page touts that there is ONE nationwide structure of tournaments. ONE nationwide points-per-round ranking system. ONE standings list. That very same page later pivots sharply into a series of statements that describe areas where USTA Sections have latitude to make decisions to “best meet the needs of their adult players.” Unfortunately, the early implementation of those decisions has revealed that a little more rigor is needed in order to preserve the integrity required to truly have ONE working system.

My Failure to see the Four-est for the Trees

On By Teresa Merklin

I had expected to start off this weekend talking about the distribution of USTA National NTRP Level 5 tournaments. In the interim, I discovered that I was completely misreading something in the tournament regulations that is infinitely more impactful. Today we are examining the number of Level 4 events that each section can sanction and taking a look at how NTRP tournaments at that level were scheduled for 2021. Depending on how you look at it, there is either an insane error or a loophole within the USTA Adult and Family Tournament Sanctioning Regulations.

Houston (Texas) We Have a Problem

On By Teresa Merklin

Yesterday I wrote about disparities in how each USTA Sectional awards sanctions Level 5 tennis tournaments under the new framework unveiled by the USTA in 2021. Some sections have a lot of Level 5 tournaments and the differences cannot be chalked up to higher levels of participation. In fact, Texas has one of the highest tournament participation levels yet relatively few Level 5 tournaments.