I anticipate that the most pushback I will get against continuously publishing NTRP ratings, as discussed yesterday, is that the information would likely be used by enterprising captains and players to better manage their ratings. Aiding and abetting sandbaggers is a legitimate concern. However, that risk is ameliorated if used in conjunction with shorter “seasons” for each division.
Shorter weekend events followed by a rapid succession to Sectionals and Nationals means that most matches played will actually matter. That directly translates to less opportunity for the chronic rating management offenders to tank matches and manipulate scores. There simply wouldn’t be enough space and time for that to be done to the extent currently exhibited across prolonged local league seasons.
Even if a player joins a short-term continuous rating league for the purpose of rating management, those matches are likely to occur in the same timeframe as the ones that matter. Gone is the opportunity to tank matches in a non-advancing fall season or to join a secondary team in a different flight to garner some solid losses to balance out the victories.
Additionally, the people that are genuinely on the border between levels would likely sawtooth between them. That departure from the current league implementation is actually a benefit of a continuous rating system. Getting bumped up would no longer be a tennis death sentence at the upper echelons. If the player hustles to find a team at the next tier, then they can still get matches in the short term.
Paradoxically, weekend events and smaller team sizes create more playing opportunities. The mega teams with 20 people on the roster, where most players get a scant two matches, simply wouldn’t exist in that format. That would serve as a forcing function for the creation of more teams. As a bonus, captaining a small roster for a weekend event is considerably easier than managing a large team over the course of a long season, so more people would likely be willing to step up.
The idea that originally sent me down this path was thinking about how technology has transformed fantasy football as well as how football has a well-defined and relatively short season. Publishing continuous NTRP ratings and shorter timelines simply wasn’t possible back in the 1970s when USTA League was created. Times have changed.
If tennis started with a blank slate to redesign USTA League from scratch, I firmly believe that leveraging the connective communication power of the internet would be central to the implementation. Increased agility is needed for the recreational-competitive tennis-playing population’s shorter attention spans and competing time constraints. It could genuinely transform USTA league play.
UTR may be doing something similar to what you’re proposing (but on a much smaller scale) with it’s four match seasons feeding directly into a playoff bracket for players with similar dynamic ratings.