Last week, I made the case that nearly every USTA League player begins their journey with a self-rating. However, here’s the thing: self-rating isn’t a one-time event. Players do it over and over again, whether they realize it or not. Every time someone signs up for a drill or clinic with a designated NTRP level, they’re making a judgment call about where they belong. Similarly, when they are in a mixed-level drill and the instructors divide courts by level, where a player walks to is essentially self-rating. That frequently reveals more about the player’s capability than the NTRP computer ever will.
It is story time, kids. (One that I could have sworn I told before, but I can’t find it, so maybe not.) The USTA National Training Campus first opened during a time when I was frequently traveling on business to the Orlando area. I feasted on the nightly drop-in drills offered by the facility. On one of my very first visits, I signed up for a 4.5+ singles clinic. At the time, I carried a 5.0 rating and was delighted to find something tailor-made for people like me.
As we gathered around the court before the session started, I struck up a conversation with one of the other players in the group and discovered that he had recently relocated there. As it turns out, he had just moved away from my local area and had previously played USTA League tennis in Dallas. He mentioned a captain I knew of, but not for the right reasons. I expressed surprise because I didn’t remember that captain ever putting together any 4.5 teams. That’s when the truth came out: “Oh, I’m not rated 4.5, but I can handle this drill.”
It was a prime example of informal self-rating in the wild. Whenever a player registers for a drill above their official NTRP level, that act is a statement of where they should self-rate themselves if they were doing it all over again. There are two distinct variations of this. Some players who consistently sign up for drills above their official NTRP level are delusional about their skills. Unfortunately, in my experience, it is much more common to find players who are indeed perfectly fine drilling at higher levels and, in fact, will only drill at the upper levels. Yet, those same people insist that their official lower NTRP rating is where they belong.
Not surprisingly, curiosity got the better of me. Later that night, I looked up the player’s current USTA rating. He was a 3.5. I wasn’t surprised since the captain he mentioned was known for creative roster construction. To be fair, the player absolutely could hang in the 4.5 drill. But that doesn’t change the fact that his official rating told a very different story.
The takeaway is that every time a player picks a NTRP-leveled drill, they’re self-rating. Most people don’t think of it that way, but it’s another layer of the same dynamic we see in USTA League tennis. It’s also why suspicion around ratings is so deeply ingrained in the culture. Everyone’s always rating themselves, whether the computer is watching or not.
If the gentlemen you refer to in the story is like the walking rating calculators in my area, one look at his yearly match record would likely show a 95% winning percentage the first eight months of the year followed by a stunning drop to 5% the two months prior to the annual ratings cutoff. Hopefully the USTA will/has added a trending component to their ratings algorithm to catch these ne’er-do-wells.