An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
As far as I can tell, pickleball players do not have jobs. They do not have families. They consume all their meals from ice coolers which they carry up to the courts with them on a regular basis. They never leave.
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Since I first wrote “Innovate or Die: USTA Adult Tournament Structure in 2021,” pretty much every “Fiend at Court Unplugged” post has examined some aspect of the upcoming changes. Until the USTA publishes something new on this topic, or we start to see events scheduled under the new structure, it is time to move on. Before I do that, I want to create a single page that chronicles what has been written up to this point in time.
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Someday I will tell the story of when I quit tennis forever. Today I want to focus on a tiny part of the story of when I came back to tennis. Specifically, how I slid down the slippery slope into the NTRP system. As previously mentioned in “My Days as an NTRP Sandbagging Bastard” I never had any desire to play NTRP rated tennis.
I keep returning to the point that Anthony Tatu raised recently in the Facebook group of avid Texas Tennis Tournament Players. His assertion was that leagues now have so many formats and variations that players no longer have “free” time to participate in tournaments. It is a valid point. For adults who already play tennis, USTA leagues are the most significant consumer market competition of USTA tournaments.
Starting in 2021, the USTA is dividing NTRP tournament participation into three age tiers: 18 and over, 40 and over, and 55 and over. If you are a regular reader of this site, this will not be news to you. I have been dwelling on the 2021 Adult Tournament changes for an extended period of time. The good news is that I think I am approaching a natural temporary conclusion of this coverage until new information emerges.
Today I am taking a somewhat broader view of participation in NTRP Tennis tournaments. For reasons that I explained yesterday, I am focused on data from my home section of Texas. Additionally, due to the workload required to sanitize and scrub data scraped off the USTA TennisLink site, I am continuing to focus only on the women’s divisions.
The USTA has announced that starting in 2021, NTRP Adult tournaments will be divided into three age tiers. The stated reason for NTRP age divisions is that it will increase participation at tournaments. In fact, the planned elimination of Mixed Doubles from NTRP tournaments was justified by projecting that the additional age tiers will create so much participation that there will no longer be courts available to accommodate Mixed.
When the USTA announced the intent to host an individual NTRP National Championship tournament for 2018, I was surprised to see separate divisions for NTRP 18+ and for NTRP 50+. The reason I was puzzled to see that, was because the bifurcation is inconsistent with the USTA assertions about the NTRP system. As I have explored this topic, I am starting to wonder if the USTA is in the midst of an NTRP identity crisis.
Yesterday I wrote about the strengths of the USTA NTRP System. Today we are examining the flip side of that coin, which are the weaknesses. While there are legitimate criticisms that can be made over the fidelity or granularity of the system, the primary issues with the NTRP system are the incentives of the league framework that surrounds it, rather than with the system itself.
The NTRP system was invented by the USTA Education and Research (E&R) office in 1978. The USTA officially created the league system the following year in 1979. The formalization of league play, as enabled by the NTRP system, fueled an explosive boom in USTA membership. Level-based play was the key to drawing increased and widespread participation in the sport.