Last weekend, I submitted my entry into the Women’s 18+ 4.5 doubles division for the NTRP National Championships, which will be held next month in Orlando. I also booked all my travel accommodations at the same time. I was happy to discover rooms were still available in my favorite hotel near the USTA’s National Campus, where the tournament is being held. While I felt like I was locking everything in fairly late, in retrospect, it wasn’t. The selection list won’t be published until February 19, a mere five weeks before players competing in the tournament must travel. I was able to book “early” due to the luxury of having a high combined ranking with my doubles partner for the event. Our acceptance is virtually assured, but that isn’t the case with many others in the field.
Before the spate of recent rules updates that govern selection into the NTRP National Championships, players knew their selection prospects at the start of each year. People with tight budgets or time constraints had a lot of calendar space to search for deals and ask for time off from their jobs or other obligations. While five weeks is still a decent amount of time to work out travel arrangements, I know that some players in my Section feel stressed over making the logistics work on a budget within that timeframe. Additionally, I suspect the prime lodging options will go quickly once selections are announced.
I was prompted to revisit the selection lead times today due to a question I received in person over the weekend and also due to similar sentiments recently expressed in the Facebook group of active tournament players in Texas. The feeling was that when the USTA moved selection closer to the tournament date, that favored the players with the financial resources to pursue points up until the entry deadline of the tournament and then immediately book cross-country plane tickets to the NTRP National Championships if they qualified. While I think that the five-week lead time is barely adequate to book reasonably priced travel, the concern over the financial inequity is still valid.
The USTA pushed out selection into the NTRP National Championships at the same time when the decision was made that players who were bumped up at the end of the year were no longer eligible to compete at their previous level during the event. That was largely sparked by the fact that NTRP updates were not issued in 2020, resulting in some players bumping up two levels the following year. It was simply bad optics to have a 4.5 competing for a 3.5 National Championship. The decision to require players to compete at their current NTRP level naturally followed.
Since the decision to make that change was made relatively late in the next qualification year, the USTA faced a conundrum over how to be fair to the players pursuing qualification based on the old set of rules that were no longer in effect. Specifically, some players who were high in the tournament point standings due to cumulatively high performance and were also promoted would have had the rug pulled out from under their feet if their NTRP level went up at the end of the year without some accommodation.
Ultimately, a two-pronged approach was elected. First, the cutoff for accumulating points toward advancing for selection to NTRP Nationals was moved until the entry deadline. That change gave players who received a new level some time to potentially play their way into the tournament. However, that favors players with the time and financial resources required to mount a two-month points-chasing sprint.
The second concession specific to promoted players was to allow them to compete at their new rating if they would have been selected based on their residual ranking at their previous level. One of the side effects of that is that players at the next higher level can no longer strictly look at the National Standings List (NSL) for their division to calculate their selection prospects based strictly on their ranking. A recently promoted player could displace someone who had performed very well on the higher level. That feels icky.
The reality is that creating a completely equitable National Championship implementation for level-based divisions has no perfect solution. Some of the best players at each NTRP rating should be promoted each year before the National Championship event occurs. I would be satisfied with returning to the initial solution, which was allowing players who received a single-level bump to compete in the NTRP National Championship at their previous year-end level. While the double-promoted players should be congratulated on their peak performance, I see no reason for the USTA to accommodate those edge cases. A double-bumped player should arguably start playing a higher division once it is apparent that they dominate the competition at their official level. Additionally, the Covid year was an anomaly that can be dismissed rather than something that should influence how eligibility is structured in the future.
However, this wouldn’t be a “FiendAtCourt” post without one last crazy idea. I think the logistics would preclude the USTA from taking this approach mostly because the updates to “Serve Tennis” would be complex. Setting that concern aside, an event could be added to accommodate players whose ratings had changed in either direction by creating interstitial divisions at 3.25, 3.75, and 4.25. Eligibility for those divisions would consist of players who were bumped up or down at the end of the previous year with selection into the NTRP National Championships using the World Tennis Number (WTN). It would be a way to give players moving up or down a chance to compete at that one tournament while also encouraging them to be the best players they could be. It would also be a way to trial WTN-based tournaments at the national level.
That idea could potentially clear the way toward making selections off the end-of-year NSL while providing all players ample time to make their travel arrangements. Ultimately, the goal of the NTRP National Championships should be to reward and showcase the best players at each level.
Wednesday’s posts always feature rules-based content, so I will finish with that. If you are a player interested in competing at the NTRP National Championships, review the materials below and enter now as the respective entry deadlines are approaching. Player selections will be made five weeks before you must travel, which is enough time to make arrangements or withdraw if you can’t find a way to make it there, given whatever life constraints you may have. As it turns out, agility when making travel arrangements is just as important as agility on the tennis court in this particular case.
- 2024 USTA Adult Tournaments Ranking Point Tables
- 2025 NTRP National Championships Selection Criteria, USTA web-published resource, undated and no version markings.
- 2025 NTRP National Championships FAQ, USTA web-published resource, undated and no version markings.
- 2025 NTRP National Championships Fact Sheet, USTA web-published resource, undated and no version markings.
- USTA About NTRP National Championships, USTA web page, viewer January 18, 2025.
