Fiend at Court Unplugged
For years the USTA has obsessed about low participation of players between 20-40 years old. There is a “bathtub” shaped curve as participation plummets when players age out of Juniors tennis. The numbers don’t recover until after people turn 40. From a marketing perspective, it is a disaster because that demographic is where disposable income lives. It is also bad for overall participation because many people don’t ever return to the tennis ecosystem.
Yesterday I wrote about a “Truth Bomb” that was dropped on me on the sidelines of a recent tournament. The assertion is that the USTA keeps dividing NTRP by age due to a belief that older players prevent younger players from participating. In short, aging-up Juniors don’t want to play with old people. Even if that is the case, segregating NTRP tennis into demographic slivers is a terrible strategy that ultimately does more harm than good to the tennis ecosystem.
The first thing that the USTA needs to recognize about the problem is that the lack of a coherent strategy for retaining Juniors is a direct reflection of how the USTA is organized. There is a lot of separation between the USTA council committees that have oversight for Junior and Adult tennis.
The Junior Competition Committee has nothing in their charter about retaining Juniors as they transition to Adult Tennis. The Adult Competition Committee is chartered with promoting and providing recreational and competitive tournament play opportunities for players 18 and over. However, the ACC does not have contact or purview over those players when they are Juniors and has not created initiatives designed specifically to attract them to Adult playing opportunities.
There is one very simple thing that the USTA can do to smooth the transition of Juniors into Adult NTRP tennis. Every junior should receive a NTRP computer rating on their 18th birthday. Additionally, that computer rating should be valid through age 30 rather than expiring after three years. This would completely solve two problems that the USTA has attracting Juniors to NTRP tennis.
There has to be recognition that the NTRP self-rating process is confusing and off-putting to former Junior players. I wrote about my own self-rating challenges in a two part post “My Days as an NTRP Sandbagging Bastard.” The descriptions of playing characteristics are somewhat divorced from the fact that ultimately the NTRP system calculates playing levels off match results. The USTA needs to understand that requiring players to self-rate creates friction that is one more barrier to attracting former Juniors to the sport.
In fact, player “confusion” was the primary reason cited when the USTA created a “unified” tournament framework with 7 tiers for both Juniors and Adults. That suggests that there was some feedback or data that former Juniors were confused about where they fit in. Somehow the fact that the confusion stems from the NTRP system was completely missed or discounted.
The NTRP system can be downright hostile to self-rated players of all ages. I have posted some USTA horror stories where adults have been nasty to younger self-rated players and almost every time I write about that topic I receive similar stories from other people. The initialization problem is one of the largest drawbacks of the NTRP system for the simple fact that people DO abuse the self-rate system.
If every former Junior had an automatic computer rating, they would know exactly where they fit into the NTRP ecosystem. In addition, other players can no longer be rude to returning players over their self-rating. You can’t blame a player for their computer rating. You can only blame the computer. The USTA should be willing and able to take that one on the chin.
The other thing that the USTA needs to do is to charter a committee specifically with retaining Junior players into the Adult ecosystem. That should be a two pronged strategy of targeted marketing as well as rethinking what tennis engagement should look like for the younger adult demographics.
Tomorrow we will take yet another look at what effective tennis engagement might look like for early Adult players by taking a hard look at another block on the USTA committee org chart.
