An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
This week’s episode of the TENNIS.com Podcast carried an interview with WTA player Julia Elbaba. During the opening of the episode, there was discussion between Elbaba and the podcast hosts on coping with the recent permanent closure of the USTA Player Development Center in New York. It was news to me to learn that there even was such a program at that location.
One of my favorite sayings is “When all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.” When thinking about how to retain junior players as they transition into adult tennis, tournaments are like the USTA’s hammer while leagues are the USTA’s wrench. Both are valuable tools, unless confronted with a screw.
Yesterday I expressed skepticism that the reason that junior players do not transition directly into adult tournaments is because they are confused about the structure. I believe that the real point of uncertainty is understanding how they fit within the NTRP system. That difficulty arises both when looking for an event to play as well as during the self-rating process.
This weekend I am continuing to consider the changes in USTA Adult Tournament Structure coming in 2021. In my initial viewing of the official USTA webinar on these upcoming changes, I observed that transitioning juniors into adult tournaments is one of the projected benefits of the updates.
I was recently appointed to a team working on a corporate initiative to improve the culture of innovation at my place of employment. Consequently the synaptic connections in my brain were already primed with research, thoughts, and data on innovation long before news of the new 2021 USTA Adult Tournament Structure started hitting my inbox.
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Yesterday I ended the “The @USTATexas Qualified CTAs” post with a challenge to locate the undocumented qualified Community Tennis Association (CTA) that was missing from the USTA Texas CTA Directory. It’s North Houston (NoHo). NoHo regularly sends very competitive teams to the USTA Texas Sectional Championships, but does not appear at all in the CTA directory.
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USTA Texas has a concept known as a “Qualified” Community Tennis Association (CTA.) Essentially a Qualified CTA is one that can send a team directly to sectionals without additional playoffs being required. While the term “qualified” is used in the USTA Texas League operating procedures, that usage is unrelated to CTA designation.
I am not originally from the DFW area. I was born and raised in Wichita Falls, Texas. Every once in a while, as I contemplate my options as I near retirement from my day job, the idea pops into my head to consider moving back to my childhood hometown. The complete absence of organized adult competitive tennis always quickly dispatches that option. I simply cannot live in a tennis wasteland.
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As previously discussed in “Rules of Tennis: Order of Service,” I have a near religious reverence for the Order of Service. In fact, I am appalled to see that it is not capitalized within the Correcting Errors section. Anything that impinges on the sanctity of the Order of Service makes me a little edgy.
As the USTA works through the ongoing effort that re-imagines the structure of the organization to get closer to players at the local level, I think that the concept of “encourage and foster” has to be one of the primary guiding principles.