On Deck

This weekend I am contemplating how the USTA digital infrastructure that supports tennis tournaments could be leveraged to improve efficiency and player experience. Yesterday’s post explored a proposed implementation of an automatic withdrawal feature to reduce tournament director workload and solve a chronic communications issue for some events. Today I am shifting my attention to another common problem and a personal pet peeve. I simply cannot stand wasted court capacity caused by inefficient turnover between matches.

The optimum use of court time is to have the players who just completed a match and the players who are next on that court all reach the gate simultaneously. In fact, when my Mom ran the Junior Super-Sectionals (now the Junior Slam) back in the 1980s, that was exactly the goal. To pull that off, the tournament desk has to prioritize putting new matches on before processing scores from the completed matches. Some organizers don’t seem to grasp the physics of time behind that fundamental concept.

Additionally, the officials on site and the tournament desk have to be connected. In the pre-mobile phone era in the 1980s, my Mom equipped the tournament desk and all the roving officials with walkie-talkies. Additionally, officiating training involved instructions to notify the tournament desk as soon as there was a handshake in a match. That would cue the site director to send the next match out to that court.

Another practice at the tournaments that my Mom ran was calling the players for the next match (and sometimes more than one) before there was a court available. In other words, she used the “on deck” concept to ensure that when a court opened, the desk wasn’t doing a scavenger hunt for the next players. Based on my own recent adult tournament play, this isn’t a common practice, but it should be.

While an “on deck” feature can be implemented manually, there are a couple of ways that the digital infrastructure can support this feature. First, tournament directors should be prompted to have a match “on deck” when all the courts are full. If there are no matches to reasonably put on deck, a “snooze” button could be activated.

Additionally, when a tournament director designates the “on deck” match, those players should get a text informing them to come to the desk immediately. For bonus points, if a player is placed “on deck” and is currently assigned to another court, the tournament director should be informed that the player isn’t available. That would close down a separate issue that isn’t quite chronic but seems to be on the uptick recently.

One more additional feature would be integrating an interface for officials into the digital tournament infrastructure. While I have seen walkie-talkies at some of the better-run larger events, a more elegant solution would be to equip officials with tablets to communicate with the tournament desk. A button to indicate that a specific court is open would be extremely useful. In fact, the logical workflow would notify the tournament desk to send the “on deck” match to that court.

Using the digital infrastructure to implement an “on deck” feature would significantly reduce the workload on tournament administration while increasing the efficiency of court usage. For player experience, it would also be an improvement because they could watch their buddy on court 12 or take a nap in their car knowing that they will be alerted when they need to head to the tournament desk in advance of an actual court assignment.

I really wish there was a formal process to propose new features to the USTA.