An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
To stick a pin in this moment in time, the general population of the United States has spent the last 3 days obsessively staring at maps because the presidential race from the general election last Tuesday has yet to be decided. It may seem like an inopportune time to throw another map into the mix, but this site is nothing if not inopportune.
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When the calendar rolls over to November each year and the USTA Texas Master’s championship has concluded, I start to scan my mail box for the Texas Tennis Tournament Guide for the coming season. Each year the Texas Section Office mails out a catalog that contains a list of the tournaments scheduled for the coming year.
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There are three fundamental ways that rankings points can motivate play. 1) Rankings points are used as selection criteria for events with limited capacity for players. 2) Seeding in tournaments is almost always done off the rankings lists. 3) Some players just enjoy seeing their name in print on the rankings list.
Rankings points matter for more than just the position where a tennis player’s name appears in a list. Sometimes rankings points translate to selection to play in nationally and internationally significant events. That incentive is most pronounced in the upper echelons, but it has also been replicated at the sectional level for NTRP levels in the USTA Texas Section.
This is the second of a two part series on the draw formats that are available to USTA tennis tournament organizers under the new consolidated framework for 2021. Yesterday I introduced the table and described the Round Robin and Round Robin with Playoff formats. Today I am describing the remaining options that are available to tournament organizers.
For the next two days I will be describing the potential draw formats players might encounter across all levels of USTA tournaments. The first step was to create a matrix that more clearly illustrated the options available at each level. It is easier for me to note the difference between the various levels in that format.
Every year I tell myself that this is the time that I am finally going to play the Cat 1 National Grass Court Championships at Forrest Hills. Playing that tournament is on my surprisingly short — and unsurprisingly tennis-dominated — bucket list. In 2020, I didn’t get to go to Forrest Hills due to the global pandemic. I am going to chalk that one up to fate.
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Yesterday I described some of the factors that brought me to enter many of the Cat 1 tournaments that I have entered. Today I am enumerating the reasons that I don’t play a full state of Cat 1 tournaments every year. In what may be the most shocking revelation of this site to date, I have a life outside of tennis.
2020 was supposed to be a banner year for me in terms of playing Cat 1 Senior Women’s National Championships. I was already entered in two events, and one of my personal goals was to play at one, if not both, of the National Grass Court Championships. Stupid pandemic.
The pinnacle of my return to tennis has been the opportunity to participate in Category 1 National Championships. Competing at that level is an amazing experience. The atmosphere and camaraderie at these events is everything tennis should be.