Have Racquet, Will Travel

Last January the post “USTA Level 5 Tournament Landscape” predicted that the NTRP National Rankings would eventually be dominated by players who traveled out of their Section chasing rankings points. The policy that allows players to play tournaments nationally, coupled with the absence of limits on the tournaments that Sections can sanction at the upper levels, creates a competitive disparity. Today’s post is a status check a year later to see if, and to what extent, that prediction has come to fruition.

As soon as I started pulling the data, I realized that another prediction made in “NTRP National Championships: You Want That Supersized?” should be examined at the same time. That post forecasted that people who did well at the NTRP National Championships would have an outsized ranking advantage for the following year if they didn’t get bumped up. In fact, that isn’t much of a prediction, but rather basic mathematics.

I decided to focus on the top 5 players in Texas in 2022 for Men’s 55+ NTRP singles and doubles. My assumption is that these are the players with the resources and time to travel to individual tournaments. The Texas Section uses rankings point standings rather than qualification tournaments to select the players they send to NTRP Nationals. Consequently, it is a player population without in-Section automatic qualifying tournaments so they are participating in a race for rankings points.

Additionally, this is the age group that the Trophy Husband plays. This means that the data is relevant for our breakfast table banter. I examined NTRP levels 3.0 through 4.5. I initially intended to include 5.0 55+, but as it turns out, those events never actually happen.

Texas only had 4 men ranked in 55+ 3.0 doubles in 2022. This gave me a total of 39 players. Some of the players who were ranked in the top 5 appeared on both the singles and doubles ranking lists, but I am treating singles and doubles playing instances as separate events. In many cases, they were.

What the Data Implies

8 of the 39 players gained significant rankings points by playing NTRP Nationals the prior year. In other words, 20% of those players were in a position to receive the NTRP endorsement from Texas simply because they played well at NTRP Nationals the previous year.

Even though the effect wasn’t as pronounced as I anticipated, this is why I continue to belabor the idea that NTRP Nationals should be excluded from the rankings lists when that is used for selection to the subsequent year’s Nationals. It really isn’t fair to send a player in the current year just because they got to go the prior year. However, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of enthusiasm for that idea.

Excluding NTRP Nationals, 6 of those 39 players played in additional tournaments out of Section. On the surface that is 15%. However, 4 of those playing instances are two people who played both Singles and Doubles at the same tournament.

This means that only a handful of the top players regularly played out of Section. This analysis may have missed some lower-ranked players that tried and failed to garner significant ranking points with the maneuver.

Additionally, of all these “top-ranked” NTRP players, only one was bumped up to the next NTRP level for 2023. It is astonishingly rare for the top NTRP tournament players to be “promoted.”

Additional Observations

The players who are playing out of Section are fairly concentrated in the 3.5 division, at least for the 55+ men. So while the practice might appear to be widespread in the Trophy Husband’s cohort of players, this data set suggests that it is not.

I also noticed that at 55+ when you get up to 4.0 and 4.5, these players have a significant amount of open age group play at various age divisions. So these players are traveling out of Section, but for age group open play. I suspect that if the participation data was studied that it might be reasonable to eliminate 55+ NTRP divisions at 4.0 and higher. These players should be prioritizing age-group open tennis.

Additionally, it was apparent that some of the players I looked at played NTRP Nationals at lower age divisions than 55+ at their respective NTRP levels.

Finishing Shots

One reason why travel might be concentrated in one or two age divisions is that once a player takes a leap in rankings from out-of-Section points, other players are incentivized to do the same thing to keep up. Or it could be that NTRP 3.5 is the epicenter of fanaticism. That level does represent the largest cohort of players, so statistical advantage from out-of-Section play is more likely to occur in that large population.

This exercise also reinforced my belief that NTRP age divisions coupled with age group open divisions have created so much fragmentation that the rankings don’t mean much anyway. Unfortunately, I don’t think that is on anybody else’s radar as a problem that needs to be solved.

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As an editorial aside, I really wish that clicking on a player’s name on a rankings list returned the results behind that ranking on the next page. Instead, users are taken to a page of all results associated with that player. Several navigation clicks are required to return to the desired context. I hope that the recently hired USTA Chief People & Culture Officer prioritizes acquiring a qualified user interface designer in addition to the data architecture expertise that is also desperately needed.