Fiend at Court Unplugged
NTRP tournaments are an important part of the adult tennis ecosystem. Implemented correctly, it is a developmental pipeline for players to improve their competitive level and potentially even advance to a level of performance that leads to participation in age-group Open events. At the same time, NTRP tournaments are a participation drain on Senior age group Open tournament play. This post outlines how NTRP tennis should be integrated into the USTA “unified” tournament framework to maximize the benefits while minimizing the downside. Spoiler alert: There is no perfect solution.
The NTRP system and the USTA 7 Level tournament framework are both mechanisms for organizing and managing tennis competition. However, they are fundamentally incompatible systems which makes it a challenge to come up with a single pyramid that works at all Levels for both. After thinking and writing about this topic for the better part of January, the solution that makes the most sense to me is to conceptualize NTRP tournaments at the “Sectional” sanctioning level. I am starting to think of Open/Age Group Adult tennis as primarily “Nationally” sanctioned events.
There are genuine benefits to the USTA’s National NTRP tournament framework. The opportunity to cross Sectional lines is something that I have personally enjoyed. Based on a cursory look at participation data that I have scraped off the USTA website, there are definitely more tournament playing opportunities in most of Sections than there were before new framework was unveiled. While some may claim that the NTRP National Championship was responsible, I personally believe that the real difference was simply promoting a defined framework to the Sections.
However, as the Sections have started to embrace the new system, the fact that the number of tournament sanctions at each Level exist only as guidelines rather than hard limits is exposing cracks that must be addressed. There is tremendous variation in the number of tournaments at each Level sanctioned by each Section office. “My Failure to see the Four-est for the Trees” details the disparities that occurred in 2021 at Level 4. Texas had 2 Level 4 tournaments while right next door Southern had 7, and Intermountain scheduled 6.
Paradoxically, taking the very popular Women’s 18+ NTRP 3.5 Doubles division as an example, Texas still dominates the USTA National rankings list with 6 of the top 10 players hailing from the Lone Star State. Southern has one player in the top 10 and the other 3 come from Intermountain. I am anticipating that the distribution will change in 2022 as players from Texas regularly start to travel out of Section to the higher point tournaments that are only available once or twice a year closer to home.
Adult tennis needs to take its cue from Junior tennis and enact strict upper limits on the number of tournaments that the Sections can sanction at the upper Levels. The following table is my proposal for a “healthy” Adult NTRP tennis ecosystem.
| USTA Tournament Level | # Tournaments per Section | Rationale/Comments |
| 1-2 | None | If the NTRP National tournament is still held, it should award no rankings points. It is not healthy to have “gaps” in the pyramid structure and the solution is NOT to create Level 2 National tournaments. |
| 3 | 2 Closed | Currently in the USTA Adult Tournament framework, this sanction is National, however Adult tennis should take its cue from the Junior framework which have placed Sectional Championships at this tier. |
| 4 | 8 Open | 8 is the number allowed at this level for Junior tennis. The Junior regulations allow 4 events to be “closed” but I do not believe that the reasons why that is a good idea for the Junior level are valid for the Adults. |
| 5 | Unrestricted | Sections can have as many level 5 tournaments as they want with the guideline that there should be more Level 5 tournaments than Level 6 tournaments. |
| 6 | Unrestricted | Sections can have as many level 6 tournaments as they want. |
| 7 | Unrestricted | Level 7 is not frequently used. I regard it as a placeholder to keep people engaged in Level 6 tournaments. |
Probably the most debatable part of that proposed allocation of tournaments is the number of Level 4 tournaments. I am actually not as hard over on the total number as I am on the fact that there needs to be a hard maximum. I could easily live with 12 but 16 is probably too many because that is more than one a month. That starts to clutter the tournament tournament calendar. Outside of the Sectional Championships, I believe that all other events should be “Open” for Adults.
An alternative implementation of this table that would also be workable is to slide everything down a notch such that the Sectional Championships are Level 4 (still capped at 2) and then Sections could sanction 8 Level 5 tournaments. That is what is in the current Adult framework implementation but is out of alignment with the Junior allocations. Remember that the 7 tier system is supposed to be “unified” for Juniors and Adults so placing Sectionals at Level 3 is more consistent.
Today’s picture is from the 2017 Master’s Championship. I chose this picture as the banner for today’s post because 5 people pictured here competed in Women’s 4.5 Singles in the inaugural NTRP National Championships 2018. The three that competed at 18+ finished 2nd, 3rd, and 4th at that event. The two who played the 50+ singles also did respectably well. None of those players were bumped up an NTRP level at the end of the year. Because that was before the NTRP National Ranking system was put into place, the outsized number of points this group won was not apparent the way it is today.
The National Ranking framework is a good thing that can be used as a tool to promote NTRP tournaments. Those tournaments can be an effective mechanism for developing a pipeline of players who advance through the NTRP system to the point where they should seriously start engaging in age group open play. The framework needs to be structured to foster those things. A critical component of that is that is that it has to be fair and equitable.
To me fair and equitable means that there is equal opportunity to play tournaments to rankings points rankings across the Sections. Additionally, National Ranking points that go to a select few and produce an annual outsized advantage have no place in the system.
If a player really wants to go to Nationals, the focus should be on being the best player they can be rather than curating performance to remain at an NTRP Level they can dominate. Players do that very thing and it is exactly the opposite of what the USTA should be promoting. It is not realistic to think that any initiative can completely stop bad behavior. Perhaps we should at least stop incentivizing it.
Tennis is best when every player strives to be the best player they can be. NTRP is a mechanism for helping players advance toward higher degrees of mastery. It should be used that way and the tournament framework should reflect that.
