One of the primary reasons the “Tennis Tournament Ranking System Player Survey” was conducted was to collect player preference data on how many tournaments should be counted in a cumulative tournament points ranking system. The results are illuminating.
I also consciously risked alienating the respondents by embedding a pop quiz as one of the questions. I wanted to determine how well people understand the current cumulative point ranking system used by the USTA. Yesterday’s post revealed that 94% of people who completed the survey had played a USTA tournament in the past 12 months. Based on that fact alone, it would be reasonable to expect high familiarity with the basics of the ranking system.
30% of people came up with the correct answer of 6. In a moment that somewhat restores my faith in humanity, the most common answer to this question was “I don’t know.” In this current polarized age, it is refreshing to encounter people who have enough self-awareness to know what they don’t know.
The most common wrong answer was 5. That was the number used in Texas prior to the rollout to the USTA National system. I also understand why some people answered 4 because until May, a prominent USTA tournament informational web page carried that error. 4 is also the number of tournaments that the ITF rankings system considers.
I was not at all surprised by the low general awareness of the number of tournaments that the USTA currently includes in rankings calculations. However, I was genuinely surprised by player preferences for what the value should be. After digging into it a little more, the numbers make more sense and are actually telling a different story than an initial glance at the bar chart might suggest.
The most common answer was that the USTA should include all tournaments played when calculating rankings. Fortunately, there were a lot of free form comments (and a little meta data) that shapes my understanding of this result.
47% of the respondents selected the “count all tournaments” answer. Correlating that with incidental meta data suggests a pretty high connection between that perspective and players who live in areas that have a lot of tournaments. Put bluntly, this answer was more common from people who can play a lot of tournaments without burning a tank of gas and spending one or more nights in a hotel room.
Other comments left against this question revealed that at least two respondents who checked the “count all tournaments” box actually prefer a true dynamic performance ranking system. That is something entirely different from the cumulative points system currently in effect. I am grateful for the people who took the time to supply that additional information. There will most certainly be another survey in the future to probe player ranking systems preferences.
This question also drew comments from people who felt compelled to highlight why counting all the tournaments in a cumulative points performance ranking system favors wealthy people with ample leisure time to travel to a lot of tournaments. (Or who live in areas that have a high number of local tournaments available to them…)
This data highlights a situation where player preferences for something might not be what is best for tennis. That is a topic that I will certainly be exploring further when time permits.
