Fall marks the start of football season in the United States. It is also the time of year when tennis fans seem to collectively forget that the professional tours continue to run throughout the fall up to the year-end Championships in December. Once college bowl season concludes, the Australian Open is like an appetizer reminding us of our love of tennis during the run-up to the Super Bowl.
Football has a season. Tennis, on the other hand, is a year-round affair. Consequently, the sport runs with an expansive sense of time. One side effect of that ostensible advantage in USTA League play is that local Leagues and Sectional Championships that feed into the National Championships don’t run simultaneously. The flexibility allows League play at the local and Sectional level to be scheduled on the dates that work best in their area.
It would be absurd to do things that way in football. You wouldn’t conduct the AFC season in the spring and then have the conference champion sit around all summer and fall waiting for the NFC to complete their division. There is an immediacy to the football calendar that doesn’t exist for USTA League tennis. While recreational-competitive tennis probably can’t hit NFL timelines, there is considerable room to tighten things up considerably.
There are a couple of reasons why it may be time to consider compressing the USTA League Schedule for each division. The first essentially comes down to continuity. The team that wins an NTRP-leveled League is the one that is collectively playing their best at the moment. The same is true of the Sectional Championships. When a three-month gap is scheduled between those Championships, performance levels can change significantly in the interim.
The second reason brings us to an innovative idea of continuous NTRP. In a nutshell, eligibility for USTA League events could be determined by NTRP dynamic levels as of a particular date. For example, the chalk line might be snapped on February 1 for a division with players between a specified dynamic rating range. A weekend League event in early March could lead to a Sectional Championship in early April. Nationals could occur in June.
It does not matter that the dynamic rating of each player may drift out of range between local registration and Nationals. In fact, the same thing already happens with the yearly NTRP tempo. However, the drift will likely be less extreme over the shorter timespan.
Another benefit of continuous NTRP would be the opportunity to assign “C” computer ratings as soon as three matches are completed. That could quickly smooth out errors or inconsistencies in the self-rating process. An egregious self-rated player would no longer have a year to carry multiple teams to victory across every USTA League format.
I also like this idea because the tighter scheduling encourages more weekend event formats. That is a benefit for the lower-population areas that can only muster enough players for one team. If an alternative qualification event does not occur, then those teams should be eligible to play in another area’s local tournament.
Weekend events also make it easier for individual players who are outperforming the competition in their local area to join a team from another city. Driving 2-3 hours for 4-5 matches over a single weekend is less daunting than traveling to that same number of matches over an 8-week season.
The new World Tennis Number (WTN) might seem like an obvious opportunity to experiment with continuous rating systems. However, there is no reason the concept could not work with NTRP levels. One advantage to doing this with NTRP is that the players are used to that system. On the other hand, the USTA would have to publish running NTRP dynamic ratings even for an isolated test. That might be a bridge too far.
When USTA League was formed in the 1970s, we didn’t have the internet and instant access to the information needed for something like this to work. Continuous ratings are an opportunity to leverage technology to transform USTA League tennis for the better.
