Over the past couple of weeks, I had the honor of competing in two USTA National Championships. Yesterday I compared the USTA League Nationals and USTA Intersectional events that I recently experienced in “A Tale of Two National Championships.” As it turns out, both tournaments were impacted by the weather. That provides a backdrop for highlighting best practices (and otherwise) for dealing with rain delays.
Weather forecasting is inherently imprecise. However, once the weather is in the past, we all experience the 20/20 certainty of hindsight. When tournament organizers make preemptive decisions about the weather, they will inevitably be second-guessed. Even in cases where the decisions were absolutely correct.
The recent 55+ 9.0 USTA League National Championships is a case in point. On the first day, the tournament organizers made a preemptive announcement mid-day indicating that all matches starting at 3:00 that afternoon would switch over to no-ad short sets. It had not rained at that point. At the time my weather app indicated only a 40% chance of rain later in the day. Additionally, rain doesn’t necessarily impact the schedule of play at a clay court event. At the time, I thought the decision was premature.
In results-oriented thinking powered by hindsight, the event organizers were correct to make that decision. A deluge started shortly before the 3:00 matches were scheduled to start. All remaining matches were ultimately postponed to the next day. However, there were other potential outcomes to consider.
For example, there is a chance that it might not have rained at all. In that case, those rounds would have been shortened for no good reason. If that had transpired, the player criticism and complaints over the unnecessary shortened format would have been significant. The USTA League National Championships organizers took a significant risk with the preemptive announcement. They didn’t have to take the chance.
The decision was fine, but the timing could have been better. I would have preferred an announcement that the event organizers were monitoring the weather and considering a change in format based on current conditions at 3:00. They still could have pulled the trigger to shortened format had it appeared that rain was imminent at that time.
A best practice of tennis event administration is to anticipate that it might be impacted by weather and to work out a recovery plan in advance. I give the organizers of the USTA National Championships an A+ for having a proactive plan in advance of the actual rain. This should be in the tournament organizers’ manual, but I don’t think it is.
I also give the event organizers high marks for communication. In years past, I have competed in USTA team events that were impacted by rain where the information flow was sporadic and only went to the captains. I love the fact that the announcement of the delays and contingencies immediately went to every player on the roster. Whoever wrote those messages did a great job.
One opportunity for improvement would be to have some slack time in the schedule to recover from rain. The clay courts at the USTA National Campus in Orlando were fully booked for the National Championships extending well into the evening. When the rain became a factor, there was no other lever to pull for recovery other than shortening the format.
As a self-avowed hater of shortened formats, I prefer that events have some excess court capacity to recover from these inevitable delays. However, that is a luxury that a lot of tournaments might not be able to afford. I get that, but if any event should have reserve court time as an option, arguably the USTA’s own National Championships would be at the top of that list.
At the USTA Intersectionals National Championships, my 55+ division was scheduled to compete last Monday through Thursday in the Fort Lauderdale/Plantation area. With Hurricane Nicole forecasted to make landfall on the Florida Peninsula late Wednesday night, the need for preemptive schedule adjustments was an obvious necessity.
At the Captain’s meeting Sunday night, a graduated scale of shortened formats was distributed along with the information that format selection would ultimately be based on the degree of weather impact. The tournament organizers preemptively went to pro-sets with advantage scoring for Tuesday. Additionally, they pulled Wednesday’s matches forward to Tuesday using the same shortened format. The event (almost) completed two rounds of team competition in a single day.
With a hurricane bearing down on the Florida peninsula, that was a good decision. It was clearly going to rain and potentially with catastrophic results for the area. There possibly could have been some play on Wednesday, however, the tennis center was shut down by the city as a safety precaution. Wednesday was a day to prepare for the impending storm.
My only complaint from the Intersectionals weather rescheduling is that communication wasn’t great. My team learned of the schedule change on Tuesday from another captain at breakfast. Additionally, my team was scheduled to play at 1230, but our matches did not actually go on until 5:00. Scheduling eclectic formats is hard. Still, our match time was egregiously off.
The USTA tournament organizer training should have instructions and best practices for communicating with players at events. On the surface, it looks like common sense, but the fact that some events struggle to communicate effectively suggests that it is necessary. Of course, the organizers must first also be able to formulate a cogent recovery plan from adverse weather in the first place.
This long and rambling rumination has led me to some foundational truths about tennis events and rain. Tournament organizers need to outline rain contingency plans in advance of their event. It is a best practice to share those contingency plans with the players if the possibility of adverse weather presents itself. Once it actually rains, tournament organizers have to open the figurative floodgates of communication. All of those things have a pretty significant impact on player experience.
The bottom line is that rain sucks. We all need to understand that sometimes event organizers are confronted with “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” decisions. None of us has a crystal ball.
