An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
A major leadership change is announced for the USTA. The Billie Jean King Cup should have been center stage this weekend, but television coverage in the US was terrible. Ash Barty’s sudden retirement hit Tennis Australia where it hurts – in the wallet.
If I had to guess, most avid tennis players are not aware that the USTA has been searching for a new CEO. Additionally I believe that most couldn’t name his predecessor even if their lives depended on it. Today is a paragraph by paragraph dissection of the USTA press release announcing the selection of Lew Sherr as the new CEO. Specifically I am looking for clues about what the new era might portend for the organization. As a reminder, overthinking such things is the hallmark of this site.
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The Women’s 4.5 division at the 2022 USTA 18+ NTRP Doubles National Championships had exactly 12 teams in the final entry list. That number provides a lot of options on how to divide the players into round robin groups. The ultimate decision was to conduct the first round robin stage as two six team pools. The downstream side effects on this one are pretty wild.
The USTA NTRP National Championships informational web pages, as well as the individual tournament event pages for the 2022 tournaments, all claim that the scoring format is played as best of three short sets. However, at least one division this year was contested using full six game sets including a full third. The question is… Why?
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George Wachtel was a Senior tennis player who also wrote a blog a blog about Senior tennis and fitness. In fact, Wachtel was still actively posting on his blog right up until his sudden death in 2021. The final two posts on his site were from his son, one announcing his death followed a short time later by his obituary. Sadly, I narrowly missed the opportunity to potentially meet this obviously kindred spirit.
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Last week a highly regarded junior tennis coach responded to my post on twitter about asking for the referee. Brian Notis of the Austin Tennis Academy observed that at the grassroots level players will encounter roving officials who do not understand subtle aspects of the Rules of Tennis. All players should be aware that they have the right to call for the referee if they disagree with an umpires interpretation of tennis law.
Bobby Reynolds was a standout NCAA tennis player for the Vanderbilt team that reached the NCAA Championship finals in 2003. He also played on the ATP tour for about 11 years where he acheived a career high singles ranking of 63. In 2010, he was featured in a Tennis Channel “Bag Check” infomercial. One of the items that Reynolds pulled out of his bag on that segment was a deck of playing cards.
Billie Jean King Cup qualifiers will be contested this weekend, an under the radar major coaching change, and another sign of the end of civility in tennis.
After my examination of the rankings points issues from the Men’s 3.0 brackets at the USTA National 18+ NTRP Singles Championships, I had planned to dig around other brackets to see if previously reported issues with the rankings points awarded had been resolved. I kind of already knew the answer and it didn’t take long to find more illuminating examples.
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I am going to start this post with a provocative statement. Whoever came up with the USTA Adult Tournament Ranking System does not understand how tournament rankings should work. Period. I am astonished that these errors ever existed in the first place. It is profoundly disappointing that attempts to highlight these issues have gone unaccepted and unacknowledged.
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