An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
Yesterday I wrote about the strengths of the USTA NTRP System. Today we are examining the flip side of that coin, which are the weaknesses. While there are legitimate criticisms that can be made over the fidelity or granularity of the system, the primary issues with the NTRP system are the incentives of the league framework that surrounds it, rather than with the system itself.
The NTRP system was invented by the USTA Education and Research (E&R) office in 1978. The USTA officially created the league system the following year in 1979. The formalization of league play, as enabled by the NTRP system, fueled an explosive boom in USTA membership. Level-based play was the key to drawing increased and widespread participation in the sport.
Before I delve too deeply into this topic, I believe that there is some evidence to suggest that the USTA has either intentionally, or perhaps unconsciously, already slotted the NTRP as a competitive strength. From the outside looking in, it appears that the NTRP system is deeply ingrained within the USTA organization.
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Last week in “Tennis Literary Time Machine: 1980 USTA Publications” I waxed nostalgic about coming across a list of books that one could order from the USTA. I commented at the time that I had several of the titles in that list in my possession. One such example is “Tennis: The Bassett System” by Glenn Bassett.
Tie-breaker in lieu of a full third set has recently become the more common match format at Adult NTRP tournaments. As a result, many of my tournaments singles matches start with the umpire reminding us of that fact. I almost always make the joke that there is very little chance that I will accidentally play a third set of singles.
Yesterday I wrote about the results of an internet search for “learn to play tennis.” I intentionally did not mention the first paid advertisement that came up as a result of that query. The ad I was served was for the PlayYourCourt tennis community. This is a perfect segue to return to the topic of TennisLink.
As an interesting thought exercise, I set up two web browsers side by side and pointed them at google. For the sake of technical completeness, I did this from a newly initialized virtual machine from a browser with no search history and ran the session through a VPN to ensure that the search could not be associated with my previous internet activity in any way. From this pristine state, I constructed a pair of queries: “learn to play tennis” and “learn to play pickleball.”
Today we are transitioning over to the side of my tennis consumer analysis that addresses the people who are engaged in tennis. Further segmentation within that market are people who are engaged in tennis in a non-playing capacity and people who play tennis. I drew a Venn diagram of these two segments acknowledging that there is some degree of overlap between those two groups.
I am delivering on the promise I made yesterday to spend the rest of the weekend examining what a comprehensive consumer analysis for tennis entails. The image that accompanies this post is my literal first draft of that effort. First, let’s revisit the statement that sent me down this path.
One of the most interesting aspects of the “2021 Adult Tournament Changes” published by the USTA is the claim that the new structure would make it easier to market tennis to the consumer. If this means that the USTA is actually about to start marketing tennis tournaments, this is super exciting news. As I previously observed in “Donald Dell Fires Shots Across the USTA Bow,” I cannot recall seeing an advertisement for playing tennis outside of a tennis context. Ever.