Mixing it Up at the 2024 NTRP National Championships

Starting in 2024, the USTA is offering 18+ Mixed doubles at the NTRP National Championships. The initiative actually started last year as Sections conducted the various tournaments required to generate enough players to fill out its Automatic Qualification (AQ) spots. Actually, I should say most Sections. Participation varies.

To the unsophisticated eye, there is a chance that the people who participated in Mixed last year will look like “new” players. In fact, I am mentally preparing myself to be regaled with celebrations of increased participation in official communications from the USTA. My guess is that most of these “new” players were already actively engaged in tournament tennis before Mixed was an option.

When the USTA first unveiled the unified National tournament framework, one of many points of contention from the playing community in my home Section of Texas was the omission of Mixed doubles. Even though there were no national rankings, tournament directors in Texas continued to conduct those divisions alongside their sanctioned tournaments. Consequently, any numbers suggesting “new” participation from that Section should consider that there has been continuous play in that format. It has simply been pulled back under the USTA umbrella.

However, the Mixed doubles participation across the USTA can still be used as a proxy to measure Sectional engagement with the format. It is also a rare instance of data that is relatively easy to glean from the USTA rankings list. NTRP Mixed doubles is a brand new event for many Sections. The salient question to ask is which Sections were the most engaged with the “new” format.

Historically, the largest USTA NTRP-rated player population is Women’s 3.5. That seems to be true for Mixed participation as well because the women who appear on the National Standing List (NSL) for that division slightly outnumber the men. When you examine the current women’s NSL for 3.5 mixed, only 14 of the 17 USTA Sections are represented. That means that three Sections don’t have any players from the epicenter of NTRP tournament tennis engaged with the format.

It is also a reasonable assumption that those three Sections did not have any tournaments. There is also a chance that they scheduled one or more tournaments and no one entered. In fact, it is possible that the unengaged Section count might be even worse that it initially appears to be. All it takes is a single player to travel out of Section for a tournament to show up in the rankings list.

If you rotate the NTRP dial a couple of notches over to women’s 4.5, only 8 of the Sections have players that appear in the NSL. That is less than 50% engagement, which isn’t great. In fact, when you break that down even further, active participation really only occurs in three Sections. Intermountain has 45 ranked players, Southern California has 64, and Texas lists 42. The rest of the Sections were in single digits.

My friend Alli from Intermountain posed a very good question on the selection for Mixed, particularly for Sections that have an odd number of AQ spots. The NTRP National Championships “About” page says the following.

The top registered player from each Section will be selected based on the quota.

Excerpt from “About NTRP: National Championships”

For Mixed, there are actually separate ranking lists for Men and Women. A section with only one AQ spot cannot select the top player from two lists. It isn’t explicitly clear what “top” means. If the top-ranked players of the men’s and women’s rankings list don’t intend to play the event with each other, which one has precedence really matters.

In my spot check, none of the Sections have published a strategy for allocating the mixed doubles spots. That is perhaps an indication that no one will think about it until confronted with the situation. There also doesn’t seem to be a way to generate a gender-consolidated rankings list for Mixed. That might be useful for a Sectional coordinator to determine who the top player actually is.

If I were a Sectional coordinator with only one AQ “Golden Ticket” to award, I would extend it to the player with the highest cumulative rankings points. For a Section with two or four spots, I would be inclined to divide the allocation evenly between the men and the women and pull directly off the top of the rankings list for each gender.

For Sections with three spots (Hey to Texas!) the move would be to award the ticket to the top-ranked men’s and women’s players and then move down a consolidated rankings point list for the remaining “golden tickets.” It also occurs to me that there is a chance that USTA National will attempt to process acceptance into the event without the input or involvement of the Section coordinators once the entry deadline passes. Having been through the TD workshop a couple of times now and seeing automated player selection in action… that is terrifying.

This is an opportunity to overthink things depending on how the selections sift out. For many Sections and divisions, the population of eligible players will be exhausted pretty fast. We will see mostly under-capacity brackets with a disproportionate number of players from Southern California, Texas, and Intermountain.

Since the tournament is in Arizona, I would ordinarily anticipate a large number of entries to slide in for the remaining open spots from the Phoenix area. However, there are only seven women’s 3.5 players in the NSL from that Section and none at 4.5. There shouldn’t be that many local players because not that many are eligible.

It will be interesting to see how the Selection policies ultimately impact the composition of the playing field at the NTRP National Championships this year. This is especially true of Mixed in its inaugural year.

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1. About NTRP: National Championships, USTA Informational Page, viewed 1/19/2023