Desperately Seeking Fast4

I spent some time this weekend scouring the USTA participation portal, TennisLink, for data about tournament offerings and participation using the Fast4 format. Locating relevant data is somewhat of a challenge since there is not a defined field within TennisLink for any particular scoring format. This means that there is no direct method in the public interface for querying for Fast4 directly.

This is frustrating for a person attempting to find data that would illuminate opportunity, participation, and trending of Fast4 format usage. The USTA probably does not care about the experience of a person attempting to scrape data off their system for the purpose of analysis. What the USTA should be very concerned with, however, is the fact that if I were a player with a burning desire to play shortened format and nothing other than shortened format, there isn’t a reliable method to find those events through the official player participation portal.

I don’t want to plunge completely down the TennisLink rabbit trail, but I will say that I am befuddled that the USTA has outsourced the portal through which participation is managed to a third party. Somewhat related to this, is the observation that in the current era of apps and social media, the way customers interact with information technology systems doesn’t just shape the customer experience, in many cases it is the customer experience. I have yet to encounter another tennis player who has positive things to say about TennisLink. I think this is a problem.

Since TennisLink does not have a good way to query for the format, I fell back to the less than perfect approach of searching for Fast4 as a keyword. This basically only turns up tournaments with Fast4 in the title. It is less than perfect, but it’s the best I can do with the interface provided.

The total numbers of tournaments with “Fast4” in the title from 2015 until 2020 is reflected in the graph featured in this post. In 2015, the year that the “global launch” of Fast4 was staged by Tennis Australia, there were zero Fast4 titled tournaments in TennisLink. There were 4 in 2016 and this number sharply rose to 40 in 2017. The peak was reached in 2018, but declined a little to 39 in 2019. So far in 2020, there are only 15 Fast4 titled tournaments scheduled.

I am hesitant to read too much into these numbers. It is tempting to look at the chart and draw the conclusion that Fast4 has already peaked and is in decline. Another explanation could be that the format is becoming more common, thus tournaments don’t have a need to specify the scoring system in the title. I would also observe that the number of events in 2020 is likely to be incomplete as there will be additional tournaments that pop up throughout the year.

The reason I wanted to stick with the Fast4 topic for this final day is to highlight the clunky nature of TennisLink in terms of finding tennis in specific formats and the general inaccessibility of data. My emerging opinion is that the data architecture of the USTA tournament data in TennisLink is not designed very well. To explore this further would be a major departure from the rules-based focus of this project. I will undoubtedly continue to think about TennisLink and the underlying data architecture in the background, but I will attempt to refrain from letting that topic encroach in this venue for a while.

Tomorrow I get back on point with section 7, “Score in a Match.”