An incident earlier this year at the Tom Fey Tri-Level National Invitational Championships sparked a lengthy examination of the history, context, and culture surrounding retiring from matches. We have been methodically sifting through the rules and regulations for the event published in an enigmatic statement on the Tri-Level informational page. It asserts that the “USTA Rules and League Regulations and Friend at Court will be enforced during championships.” [sic] Today, we are starting into the USTA’s Friend at Court rules about retiring from matches.
Part 3 of the USTA Friend at Court is titled “USTA Regulations.” Those rules are contextually specific to tournament play. The first mention of match retirements is a great example of the tournament-specific nature of these rules. USTA Regulation II.B.6.d establishes how the standings are calculated in a round-robin draw when one or more matches conclude with a retirement. It is a procedural direction with no hint that retiring from matches might be prohibited.
This rule includes a USTA comment reminding the tournament Referee that it is important to correctly code each match not played or completed. That explicitly includes retirements.
The Referee’s determination as to whether a match should be scored as a default (and its type), withdrawal, or retirement affects the outcome of the round robin. Therefore, the Referee should use great care in determining why a player is not playing a match.
USTA Friend at Court Comment II.B-10
Jumping ahead a little bit, Table 10, “Draw Sheet Terminology and Procedures,” lists the specific codes for retired tournament matches. It provides the abbreviations and expanded definitions of those codes. Once again, this is procedural detail, with no indication that match retirements are prohibited.
As an interesting aside, when I tried to look up how the retired match at Tri-Level was coded, I discovered that the USTA League software does not collect that piece of information. In retrospect, that is not surprising because coding of matches does not matter for USTA League play. Consequently, it is not defined within the USTA League Regulations. Had this been a tournament, the match in question likely would have been recorded as “Ret [pc]” or Ret[inj].”
The next mention of retired matches is in the context of the Garman scheduling system. That is a mathematical algorithm for maximizing court usage while minimizing player wait times at the tournament desk. Table 7, “Scheduling Matches,” mentions that the Garman system makes assumptions about the rate of retired matches. Not surprisingly, that table does not indicate that retiring from matches is against any rule.
So far, everything we have discussed from “USTA Regulations,” defined in Part 3 of the Friend at Court, addresses retired matches as a routine occurrence during tournament play. However, that source contains two additional references to match retirements.
This is when our lengthy rules trace starts to get truly interesting. Those additional passages might contain the seeds of cultural belief that contributed to part of what transpired at the Tom Fey Tri-Level National Invitational Championships earlier this year. That will be the focus when this series resumes on Friday, April 26.
- USTA Tri-Level National Invitational Welcome Page, USTA SoCal Hosted Informational Page, last viewed April 6, 2024.
- 2024 USTA League National Regulations, USTA Resource Document, March 14, 2024.
- Friend at Court: The Handbook of Tennis Rules and Regulations, USTA, 2024
- USTA Adult and Family Tournament, Ranking, & Sanctioning Regulations, USTA Regulation, as amended December 14, 2023.
- USTA League Suspension Point System Calculation Tables, USTA Resource Document, February 6, 2024.
- USTA League Suspension Point System 2024, USTA Resource Document, February 6, 2024.
- USTA League Suspension Point System Frequently Asked Questions, USTA Resource Document, March 23, 2023.
