Fiend at Court Unplugged
There is an error in how the new USTA Digital Platform calculates order of finish in Round Robin pools. I stumbled across it when building the comparison data set used in yesterday’s post. I deferred talking about it until today because it is an issue that merits dedicated attention.
Evidence of the problem is exhibited in the NTRP 3.0 Women’s 18+ division from the “Level 4 Closed – Simply the BEST – 2021 Texas Adult Masters Championships.” The following table summarizes the results from the “Group 2” Round Robin pool.
Barajas and Wells were marked as the winners of the group. However, Fisher and Fisher advanced to play the Championship match against the winners of Group 1. That was the right thing to do. Despite the fact that the USTA Digital Platform identified Barajas and Wells as the top finishing team, they did not in fact finish in that position.
Of all the errors that the new USTA Digital Platform can make… incorrectly identifying the winner of a Round Robin pool is pretty significant.
While Barajas and Wells won the two matches they actually played, they defaulted their third with an injury withdrawal. The most obvious tiebreak criteria for determining Order of Finish in a Round Robin pool is the winner of the head to head matchup. That is likely what the software used to make the determination. However, the following clause from the USTA Regulations published in the USTA Friend at Court takes precedence.
A player who is defaulted for any reason other than lateness shall not play in subsequent matches and may not be declared the winner of the round robin. A player who is defaulted, retires, or creates a walkover shall finish lower than every player who has an identical match record.
Excerpt from USTA Regulations II.B.d in the 2021 USTA Friend at Court [1]
So the positions in the Order of Finish for this group should have been reversed between the two teams that went 2-1 in their pool. I have no insight into how complicated it was to override the winning team in the USTA Digital Platform. I assume that a change of that nature would require a manual override from the outside the span of control of the tournament director.
It also occurs to me that the USTA Adult Competition Committee might be aware of this issue with Order of Finish in Round Robin pool play which could explain the reluctance to make point adjustments for the entire field in Round Robin brackets played in 2021. Chalk that up top yet another opportunity for the USTA to take charge of the narrative through transparent communication to the playing population.
In previous posts I have hinted at my growing perception that the Requirements documentation that the USTA provided for the 3rd party firm retained to do the development on this project might not have been terribly detailed or rigorous. I am now wondering what (if any) acceptance testing is performed independently by the USTA on the back end.
Hint: Correct Order of Finish in a Round Robin pool with various permutations of player withdrawals should be included in test cases.
- United States Tennis Association (2021), Friend at Court: Handbook of Rules and Regulations, White Plains, NY.
- 2021 USTA Adult Tournaments Ranking System, USTA Web Hosted Document, viewed 11/11/2021.
Since we have been in that Masters Tournament for the past several years, I have found your last two articles to be really interesting.
In the 3.5 mixed doubles, one of the foursomes had only three teams while the other foursome had 4 teams. It would be interesting to see if that had any affect on the points.