An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
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.
Over the weekend, the USTA sent out a letter to players who were slated to play in the individual NTRP National Championships in 2020. It was a follow up to a survey sent out to players shortly after the original event in April was cancelled. The survey was sent to explore the possibility that the NTRP Championships would be rescheduled for October of this year. This new communication makes it clear that there will be no tournament in 2020.
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.
Before I delve too deeply into this topic, I believe that there is some evidence to suggest that the USTA has either intentionally, or perhaps unconsciously, already slotted the NTRP as a competitive strength. From the outside looking in, it appears that the NTRP system is deeply ingrained within the USTA organization.
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Yesterday I wrote about the results of an internet search for “learn to play tennis.” I intentionally did not mention the first paid advertisement that came up as a result of that query. The ad I was served was for the PlayYourCourt tennis community. This is a perfect segue to return to the topic of TennisLink.
As an interesting thought exercise, I set up two web browsers side by side and pointed them at google. For the sake of technical completeness, I did this from a newly initialized virtual machine from a browser with no search history and ran the session through a VPN to ensure that the search could not be associated with my previous internet activity in any way. From this pristine state, I constructed a pair of queries: “learn to play tennis” and “learn to play pickleball.”
Today we are transitioning over to the side of my tennis consumer analysis that addresses the people who are engaged in tennis. Further segmentation within that market are people who are engaged in tennis in a non-playing capacity and people who play tennis. I drew a Venn diagram of these two segments acknowledging that there is some degree of overlap between those two groups.
I am delivering on the promise I made yesterday to spend the rest of the weekend examining what a comprehensive consumer analysis for tennis entails. The image that accompanies this post is my literal first draft of that effort. First, let’s revisit the statement that sent me down this path.
When I played junior tennis there were two ways to enter a tennis tournament. One was to visit the host facility of the event to register and pay the entry fee. The other was to fill out a physical entry form and mail it into the host organization with a check. This is the point in the story where the umpire I gave birth to usually interjects to ask about the stone tablet postage rates for those entry forms.