A little over a week ago, I received a draft of a new “Captains’ Quick Guide” for the USTA Women’s Team Intersectionals. This new rulebook had already been reviewed and approved by the event’s Tournament Director and the committee assembled to write it it. As the document was being prepared for release, a copy was sent to members of the NWTO Board primarily for informational awareness. However, that request also asked us to identify anything that appeared problematic or needed clarification.
I am glad they took that step because I immediately saw a problem.
This will require some explanation for anyone unfamiliar with Intersectionals, and it is a situation that will probably never matter to most tennis players. Only a relatively small number of people are selected for Intersectionals teams each year, and lineup construction is primarily a captain’s concern. However, I am writing about it this weekend because it reflects a best practice and object lesson on the value of conducting independent reviews.
While the precise format of the competition at Intersectionals varies across age divisions, the most common format is three lines of singles and two lines of doubles. Unlike USTA League tennis, a player may compete in both singles and doubles in the same team matchup. Consequently, the singles lines are played in the morning, and the doubles lines are played in the afternoon.
Two lines in the proposed rulebook sent to me created order-of-strength restrictions for the doubles lines. The intent was to prohibit captains from stacking or flipping their doubles lineups. Under the draft I received, once a doubles pair played together at line one, they could not subsequently play together at line two. The following two provisions in the rulebook established that restriction.
- If a doubles pair has played a match at line one doubles, they may not play together at line two doubles in a subsequent match.
- If a doubles pair plays at line two and later plays at line one, the pair may subsequently return to line two if a stronger team is inserted at line one.
On the surface, these restrictions sound perfectly reasonable, but they can create the precise problem they were intended to prevent. In fact, the second statement is a pretty good indication that someone knew a doubles team might legitimately need to move from line 2 to line 1 and back, but the logic breaks down under certain conditions.
I tried and failed to come up with a concise way of expressing the problem, but eventually came to the conclusion that the best approach is to step through a hypothetical illustration. Consider the following roster:
- Alice and Betty are 5.0 players who have teamed up to win many Level 1 National Tournaments together and recently won the World Championships in their age division.
- Carla and Deb are regarded as very strong 4.5 players, but have never played doubles together.
- Ellen and Fay are an established doubles team in their local league, and both are rated 4.0. They were late additions to the roster after two other players dropped out, and were happy to make the trip in case emergency subs became necessary.
Intersectionals is a bracketed team tournament. That means that if a team wins all three singles lines in the morning, they have advanced to the winner’s draw even if they lose both doubles matches in the afternoon. If that happened during the first round to this hypothetical team, a savvy captain would likely elect to sit Alice and Betty in the afternoon. That keeps them fresh for their singles matches the next morning and avoids the risk of injury in a match that doesn’t have any bearing on advancement.
However, since Carla and Deb have never played together before, their captain is likely to be highly motivated to pair them together for what is essentially a practice match, and line one is where they should see the strongest competition. Sometimes doubles teams that should work on paper don’t work so well in real life, and many teams play better after spending more time on the court together. That means Ellen and Fay will be slotted into line two, giving them a chance to get on the court.
So now let’s say that when the subsequent winner’s bracket match is played the next day, the team fails to carry all the singles lines. Depending on whether they lost one or two matches, they now need to win one or two of the doubles lines to advance to the semis. The team captain is in an enviable position with the sitting world champions on the roster, but where to play them would be restricted by this new rulebook and the fact that they did not play in the first round.
Faced with this situation, most captains would likely want to play their best doubles lineup available. However, based on the way the rules referenced above were written, Carla and Deb would have to remain on line 1 for the duration of the tournament, and Alice and Betty would be forced down to Line 2. That is exactly the flipped/stacked lineup that the rules were trying to prevent.
I replied to the person who requested the review of the Intersectionals “Captain’s Quick Guide” with a message that articulated this issue and proposed alternative language that locks in an order only when the same four players are used with the same partners.
That back-and-forth took a couple of iterations, which led to the hypothetical example above for greater clarity. Putting names against the players and walking through the consequences across two rounds made the problem much easier to illustrate.
This saga is a case study of the importance of reviewing the rules before they are published. The people who write a rule know what they intend it to accomplish, and read it with that meaning in mind. An independent reviewer approaches the text unburdened by the preconceptions of intended meaning. Fresh eyes may see circumstances or edge cases that the original authors did not consider.
Review is more than just proofreading. There was nothing grammatically wrong with the provision I questioned, and its objective was reasonably apparent. At the same time, my day job has conditioned me to be particularly sensitive to what can go wrong. Additionally, I experienced a very similar scenario to this when captaining an Intersectionals team three years ago. It was that perfect storm that armed me with the perspective needed to immediately see the problem.
My suggested replacement text may not be the eventual answer. Someone else may identify a problem with it or develop a cleaner way to accomplish the original objective. That would be a perfectly good outcome. Identifying a defect and determining the best way to correct it are separate parts of the process, and additional review of any proposed correction is how we avoid simply replacing one problem with another.
I spend a lot of time writing about tennis rules and regulations after they have already been adopted. By then, ambiguity and unintended consequences become much harder to fix because they’re already part of the framework players and captains are expected to follow. Fixing it may require another formal change, along with the approvals and communication that come with that process.
In this case, the document had already been reviewed by the people most directly involved in developing and approving it, yet someone still decided to distribute it more broadly and ask whether anyone else saw a problem. Whether my proposed solution is accepted matters less than the fact that the review happened while there was still time to do something about it. It is much better to find it and fix it in advance than to sort this out in real time during the heat of competition.
