The “Schedule” tab within the USTA’s tournament digital infrastructure is an example of how the effective use of technology can improve player experience. Unfortunately, that feature is also a cautionary tale that illustrates the need to understand the available capabilities and more critically to actually use them.
The following image is a screenshot of the “Schedule” tab captured before play got underway on the first morning of the tournament that I played in this weekend. It illustrates the default configuration of this particular corner of the USTA’s digital infrastructure. While you might expect the schedule tab to include the tournament’s upcoming matches, it doesn’t.
Fortunately, this particular tournament director is very responsive to player requests. Shortly after I asked him if he would enable this feature, the following screenshot was captured. This illustrates what the schedule tab looks like when populated with upcoming scheduled matches.
I am challenged to understand why the people who implemented ServeTennis decided that scheduled matches shouldn’t appear by default on the schedule tab. The default view consisting only of a list of the completed matches is pretty much useless. If I want to know a particular match result, I will look that up in the draw rather than scrolling through a list of everything that had been played. It wouldn’t break my heart if completed matches didn’t appear on that tab at all.
A list of the matches in progress seems to be configured to appear by default once tournament play begins. However, I occasionally play in a tournament where that information is disabled. That is unfortunate because the list of the matches in progress includes the assigned court number. That is extraordinarily useful for both players and spectators. For example, if I am interested in scouting a match for potential opponents, the court number where they are playing can be looked up on my phone. Consequently, that is one less interruption for the tournament desk. Similarly, every once in a while, I want to know who the players are in a match that I casually observe. Once again, the answer to that question is in my pocket.
The list of the upcoming scheduled matches is extremely useful to players. It gives a sense of how the tournament is running and how far out a player’s next match is likely to be. That is vital information for timing food intake and optimizing warm-up activities. Unfortunately, the scheduled matches are “off” by default. Worse, sometimes tournament directors are willing to turn that feature on but can’t figure out how to do it within the digital platform. The configuration setting is apparently in a devilishly hidden corner of ServeTennis.
At the 2024 Cotton Bowl, I found another argument for turning on that information by default. One of the volunteers at my playing site struggled with the ServeTennis platform, which was showing him a list of matches for all sites rather than filtering down to our location. At one point, five playable courts stood empty while he struggled to figure out which matches he should be putting on.
Had the schedule tab been implemented, any players loitering around the tournament desk could have provided him with the list of upcoming matches. I eventually helped resolve the deadlock by going through every draw assigned to our site on my phone and creating a handwritten list of the upcoming matches. It was a tedious process. Once the courts were full and we had a comfortable backlog of the next matches to be put on, we figured out how to reset his session with ServeTennis. That resolved the site filtering issue.
On one occasion, I heard a tournament director tell a room full of people at a training workshop that under no circumstances should the feature to list the actual scheduled matches be enabled. The reason cited was that if people have that information, they will try to help the director run the tournament. Having participated in a few events run by that person, I think the reason people may try to intercede is not because they have too much information but rather because help is needed.
It is hard for me to understand a tournament director who is opposed to having engaged players monitoring the tournament schedule. Having a match volunteer to go on early when there is an open court is never a bad thing. As a tournament director, I would be thrilled to have players proactively managing their schedules to optimize their readiness. Quite frankly, any perceived downside of player access to a list of scheduled matches probably points to a different root problem than too much information.
I strongly believe that the list of scheduled matches should be included in the “Schedule” tab by default. Tournament directors should not be expected to perform any extra work to turn it on. Instead, the burden should be placed on those who are hard over on preventing players access to that vital information. In my experience, the vast majority of tournament directors will stick with the default configuration. Given that, the impetus is to have the best option implemented as the default.
Of all the ideas I have proposed for improving the tournament player experience by leveraging technology this weekend, this is the easiest one to implement immediately. It is as simple as enabling the tools already available within the platform. The “Schedule” tab within the USTA’s ServeTennis platform should be configured by default to actually show the schedule. It is a best practice for tournament directors to routinely turn on that feature. However, it would be even better to enable it by default. It is another little thing that could make a big difference.
