Yesterday, I wrote about a USTA League rule with potential unintended consequences that took several years to become apparent. Today’s example is considerably easier to understand because players figured out how to work around the rule almost immediately. I know this for a fact, because I was one of them.
In 2020, Fort Worth added a new residency requirement to its local League regulations. The current version appears as Regulation 2F: “Team rosters must be made up of 60% of players residing within the Ft Worth playing area.”
Fort Worth defines that area as Tarrant, Denton, Parker, and Johnson Counties, with some additional geographic specificity in the regulation. That definition is important because USTA Texas defines the local playing area more broadly under the “50-mile radius” provision. As a point of geographical fact, a large percentage of active players in Dallas and Fort Worth satisfy the USTA Texas local residency requirement for both areas. However, Fort Worth’s Regulation 3F excludes many players who are considered local to that area per the USTA Texas regulations.
I remember exactly when the 60 percent rule was introduced because I was captaining a Women’s 5.0 team at the time. Fort Worth barely had enough 5.0 players to support a two-team league, something that I made happen by pulling in quite a few players from the Dallas side of the Metroplex. When the new residency requirement arrived in 2020, I quickly discovered that my 2019 roster was barely out of compliance with the new rule. I tried, and failed, to find another legitimate 5.0 player who met Fort Worth’s geographic requirement. Eventually I solved the problem by adding my 4.5 computer-rated daughter to my team with absolutely no intention of playing her.
That solved my immediate problem, but arguably did not accomplish what Fort Worth was trying to solve with the new rule. Adding my daughter to my team did not create another Fort Worth 5.0 player interested in competing on my team. It did not increase local 5.0 participation. It did not make my team more representative of Fort Worth in any meaningful competitive sense. All it did was change a mathematical calculation.
The systemic problem with Regulation 2F is that the rule measures roster composition, rather than participation.
My workaround was hardly sophisticated, and other captains have clearly arrived at variations of the same solution in the interim. If a team wants to use players who satisfy the USTA Texas 50-mile residency requirement but live outside Fort Worth’s more restrictive geographic boundary, the captain can simply add enough qualifying Fort Worth-area players to make the numbers work. There is no maximum roster size. The only practical constraint is finding eligible people willing to be added and someone willing to pay their registration fees.
In many cases, the captain pays, and I don’t fault them for doing so. They are trying to create legitimate playing opportunities that might not exist without their teams. In some cases, they reach into their own pockets to carry extra players solely because it lets everyone else compete. In other words, they are working with the system they have been provided.
The math makes the workaround straightforward. If a captain wants eight players who fall outside Fort Worth’s definition, a 20-person roster containing 12 qualifying local players satisfies the 60 percent requirement. Nothing in 2F requires those 12 players to play 60 percent of the matches. For that matter, the regulation does not require any particular player used to establish compliance to play at all.
One roster I recently examined carried 20 players. Two never played. Another five competed only once, with most of those appearances occurring after the league playoff advancement was decided. On paper, all 20 players count equally when calculating compliance with the residency requirement. As a measure of who actually constituted the competitive team, the roster tells a considerably different story.
Enforcement makes the incentives even more interesting. Captains tell me that compliance with the 60 percent requirement is checked somewhat sporadically. Teams may receive an early-season notification instructing them to bring a roster into compliance. Midseason additions seem to receive less scrutiny. However, advancing teams can most certainly expect their rosters to be examined for compliance with both the Fort Worth 60 percent requirement and the USTA Texas 50-mile radius rule.
This is a perfect example of getting exactly what you measure. Fort Worth captains optimize their roster’s residency composition. If the actual objective is to ensure that Fort Worth teams consist primarily of Fort Worth players, the metric is a poor proxy for the desired outcome.
I have some insight into what led to the rule. At the time, there was considerable concern that “Dallas” teams were coming to Fort Worth, qualifying through the smaller area, and effectively taking Sectional opportunities away from Fort Worth teams. There was also angst over players coming over from Dallas for non-advancing fall leagues and manipulating match results to manage ratings.
Those are legitimate problems for Fort Worth League tennis. The question is whether Regulation 2F actually solved them, balanced against what it cost in the process.
The rule almost certainly curtailed some Dallas participation in Fort Worth. That is what geographic restrictions are designed to do. The unintended consequence is that Fort Worth’s upper-level leagues appear to have needed some of those crossover players to maintain critical mass.
My 5.0 team when the rule was enacted might be the earliest example. The second year after the rule was put into place, I lost a couple of players through injury and pickleball. The available population was already so thin that replacing those players under the residency requirement was no longer practical. I was unwilling to field a non-competitive team or write a check for additional phantom players to bring my team into compliance. I stepped down from captaining, and nobody else was willing to assemble a second team under those conditions. Women’s 5.0 disappeared from Fort Worth.
I cannot claim that the 60 percent rule single-handedly killed Women’s 5.0 League tennis in Fort Worth. The player population was already precariously small, which was precisely why losing a couple of players mattered so much. What I can say definitively is that the additional restriction made assembling another viable team harder, and it was a factor in my own decision to stop trying.
Women’s 4.5 League play has followed a less dramatic version of the same trajectory. When the 60 percent rule was introduced, Fort Worth had four Friday teams and two Saturday teams at 18+ 4.5. Today it has two Friday teams and two Saturday teams. Those numbers also overstate the size of the underlying population because most of the same players compete on both days.
Just like the contraction discussed yesterday, this decline occurred during a period in which overall tennis participation has been booming. That should matter when evaluating whether the rule is accomplishing enough good to justify the friction it creates. Fort Worth wanted to protect opportunities for Fort Worth players. However, if restricting crossover participation contributes to having fewer viable Fort Worth teams, the rule can eventually undermine the very thing it was intended to protect.
There is another factor that makes the decline easier to overlook. League teams generate revenue through player registrations. When a team disappears, those registrations disappear with it. However, the 60 percent rule itself encourages captains to carry larger rosters because additional Fort Worth-area players can be necessary to maintain compliance. A phantom registration and an active player’s registration look exactly the same on the balance sheet.
I am not suggesting that anyone designed the system to produce that outcome or is consciously trading viable teams for larger rosters. I do think it demonstrates why registration totals and revenue can provide a misleading picture of league health. Fort Worth can lose teams and meaningful competitive participation while larger rosters partially offset the corresponding decline in registration revenue. Registrations, participation, and viable teams are three different things.
This is also why simply closing the loophole is not necessarily the answer. Fort Worth could rewrite 2F to require 60 percent of actual match participation to come from players residing within its boundary. That would make the measurement more closely resemble the apparent intent of the rule. It would also create an even greater restriction on teams that are already struggling to find enough appropriate players. (Please do not do that. It is a bad idea.)
The more useful question is whether the underlying geographic restriction makes sense in every league. A residency rule that creates manageable friction in a large 3.5 population can have a very different effect at 4.5 or 5.0. At the center of the participation bell curve, losing a handful of crossover players may be inconvenient. At the tip of the pyramid, the same handful can gate whether a league exists at all.
That concern has become more urgent to me because Fort Worth has recently added another restriction for the 2027 League year. The automatic Sectional commitment provision I discussed yesterday has arrived in Fort Worth. Players who compete in overlapping areas now face another factor that might tip the scales toward the decision that playing on a Fort Worth team is not worth the complications.
We do not have to rely on pure speculation about what can happen when that type of rule is introduced into a small upper-level player population. Yesterday’s post examined five years of Houston-area data showing Women’s 4.5 League disappearing entirely from NoHo while participation also declined substantially in HTA. I was careful not to claim that the commitment rule caused that decline because the available data cannot establish causation.
However, Fort Worth now gives us an opportunity to pay attention before another five years pass. The 18+ Women’s 4.5 population is already razor thin. The situation at 40+ and 55+ is even more precarious. For leagues operating this close to the edge of viability, losing only a handful of players can make the difference between conducting a league and not having it at all.
This is where individually defensible rules can become collectively destructive. A 60 percent residency requirement can be defended. An automatic Sectional commitment rule can be defended. A 50-mile residency requirement can be defended. Each addresses some perceived problem.
The player experiences all of them together, and every additional restriction adds friction. Large populations can absorb quite a bit of that. Smaller populations cannot.
Six years after Fort Worth introduced the 60 percent rule, captains have demonstrated exactly how they respond to it. Some stopped captaining when assembling a viable roster became too difficult. Others added players they do not really need and may have no intention of playing. Some personally fund those extra registrations because working around the rule is the only practical way to preserve the playing opportunities for themselves and others.
None of those behaviors suggests that captains are the problem. (To be clear, they are not.) Rather, the courses of action that current and former captains are taking are feedback from the system we have provided to them.
I believe the 60 percent rule was created for a legitimate reason. Fort Worth wanted to protect local playing opportunities and prevent teams from using the area merely as an alternate route to Sectionals. I may disagree with aspects of that philosophy, but I understand the problem the rule was intended to solve. Six years later, however, I don’t think Regulation 2F is working as intended.
The 60% rule discourages some crossover participation that upper-level Fort Worth leagues need, while captains who remain simply add players to satisfy the mathematical requirement. The result is a rule that creates real friction without necessarily producing teams that are meaningfully more local.
When the people operating inside a system repeatedly find ways to satisfy a rule without accomplishing its objective, that is evidence that it is time to revisit the original problem, decide whether it is still perceived as a problem that needs to be solved, and, if so, try to find a better solution that doesn’t crush participation at the upper levels.
