Earlier this month, the Trophy Husband and I encountered issues when trying to enter Husband-Wife in the Dallas Cotton Bowl Tennis Classic. The tournament was set up to disallow divisional crossover entries, a decision with downstream negative ramifications that organizers uniformly fail to anticipate. (Sigh.) Unfortunately things went from bad to worse as the tournament entry software prohibited people from entering combinations of divisions that should not be flagged as crossover at all. At the time, I expressed confidence that the tournament director would find a way to fix it. Spoiler alert, things did not work out.
On the date of the entry deadline, and in the absence of any recent response from the tournament director to our continued queries, the Trophy Husband suggested that we should both consider finding a partner for NTRP Mixed in our respective divisions. 15 seconds later, at least according to the Trophy Husband, I was entered in 18+ 4.5 Mixed. That simply isn’t true. It was almost a full 5 minutes. How was I supposed to know that courtesy demands a grace period of inactivity before moving on in this situation?
If pressed, the tournament director will probably claim that we should have waited for him to work it out. In fact, later that same afternoon he extended the entry deadline by two days, which may have been a move to give him more time to work out the entry issues. At the same time, some communication as the deadline loomed would have encouraged more patience on our part.
There’s a lot to break down here because a lot is broken. Prohibiting divisional crossovers is a bad practice that the USTA should strongly discourage if not outright prohibit. With the continued fragmentation of NTRP divisions by age, the USTA has actually exacerbated the problem. Divisional fragmentation is killing participation and prohibiting crossovers makes it worse.
If the USTA has any intention of rebuilding Adult tournament play, tournaments that do not allow divisional crossovers should be exceedingly rare. In fact, I think that each exception should require approval from the USTA Section if not National.
Understanding the Problem
To make sure we are all on the same page, here is the USTA’s official definition of a division:
Division. Division refers to one or two events in a tournament in which the eligibility criteria are identical. For example, the Girls’ 16 Singles and Girls’ 16 Doubles are two events but only one division because their eligibility criteria are identical.
USTA Friend at Court, Glossary
When the USTA started dividing NTRP levels by age, they tripled the number of divisions per the official definition. In other words, NTRP 18+ 3.5, NTRP 40+ 3.5, and NTRP 55+ 3.5 are three separate divisions because the eligibility criteria are not identical. Before the NTRP age divisions perturbed the system, a crossover entry traversed NTRP levels.
Strict interpretation of the written policy is one thing. What the USTA software does is another. I have several past blog posts detailing issues where the software diverged from written policy when calculating rankings points. Leading into the Cotton Bowl tournament, some crossover entries between age groups within a single NTRP level were being rejected, which is in alignment with the regulations.
For example, the Cotton Bowl only offered NTRP Mixed divisions at 18+ this year. In other words, there was a single NTRP Mixed draw at each level. Although this problem was later fixed as is apparent from the draws, I heard from people who were unable to enter 55+ Doubles and 18+ Mixed when entries first opened because the system was flagging those two events as a divisional crossover.
Paradoxically, a couple of the Trophy Husband’s friends were able to mix and match men’s Doubles and Singles NTRP age divisions within a single NTRP level. It defies logic that the Mixed prospective entries would be denied as a divisional crossover when there was no non-crossover event for them to play. If someone wasn’t tweaking the configuration settings in the background, the software contains some logic inconsistencies.
Our attempted Husband-Wife entry is an entirely different matter because it is, per strict interpretation of USTA policy, a divisional crossover. However, it is one that highlights the absurdity of prohibiting crossovers in the first place. Husband-Wife is a “Family” event with “Open” age eligibility criteria. That is different from my entry in 18+ 4.5 Women’s Doubles because the age criteria are different.
It is tempting to propose that Husband-Wife should be 18+, but this is Texas where the legal marital age is 16. Additionally, Husband-Wife is one of three “Family” divisions offered by the Cotton Bowl this year. When you roll Mother-Daughter and Father-Son into the mix, then 18+ is clearly the wrong minimum age floor for Family divisions.
Though we were ultimately unable to enter Husband-Wife in this tournament, I have observed one more curiosity from my experience previously playing that division. When I enter Husband-Wife, the USTA requires me to select my partner. You wouldn’t think that would be a choice, but I guess that’s a side effect of removing USTA Family memberships.
Divisional Crossovers Tournament Director Perspective
Tournament directors love divisional crossovers because it greatly simplifies scheduling. However, that is only the case if each division is scheduled to a single site each day. Assuming both those things occurred, any scheduling conflicts can be theoretically worked out with a single tournament desk. Additionally, commute times between sites are eliminated.
Unfortunately, it also cuts down on the total number of entries. What is truly maddening is that divisions frequently end up combined anyway. There are numerous examples of teams being unable to enter a division, only to see the NTRP age divisions collapse into a single draw anyway.
Some people are sidestepping this and getting into tournaments via the “email the tournament director” route. However, this creates an additional manual load on that person. Additionally, as evidenced by our failed Husband-Wife entry into the Cotton Bowl… individual player experience and success may vary.
Additionally, Wednesday night at the Cotton Bowl there were a bunch of women hanging out at LB Houston Tennis Center waiting for our 4.5 Mixed partners to commute to the site from Huffhines Tennis Center in Garland where the men’s 4.5 Doubles was played. Show me a tournament director that prohibits divisional crossovers who doesn’t back that up by assigning each division to a single site… and I will show you a tournament director that doesn’t understand the ramifications of their decisions.
Divisional Crossovers Tournament Player Perspective
The tournament players… follow me closely on this… enter events because they want to play tennis. Prohibiting divisional crossovers is bad for players because prospective partner pools are fragmented by artificially age-divided NTRP divisions. Fewer entries results in less tennis, which isn’t good for the participants.
As an additional observation, Single Elimination is uniformly bad for tournaments that are positioned at a Level that is supposed to attract Section-wide entries. Despite being a Level 5, the Cotton Bowl doubles were advertised as Single Elimination this year. If a player can’t find a workable permutation of doubles partners and divisions, then the players are faced with playing Singles or risk traveling for only one match. It should come as no surprise that the tournament participation is mostly local this year.
Speculating on the USTA Perspective
The mission of the USTA is literally to promote participation in tennis. However, when it comes to tournaments they are in between a rock and a hard place. In a way, tournament organizers are the true customers of the USTA in this case because they organize events that bring in revenue. If the USTA doesn’t make it easy for tournament organizers, then there might not be any tournaments at all.
Unfortunately, prohibiting divisional crossovers is one press of the “Easy” button too many. The event happens but at the cost of alienating the player base.
A Better Solution
Back in the heyday of USTA Adult Tennis in Texas, the typical restriction on tournament entries was One Singles, one Doubles, and one “Special” which included Family and Mixed. Tournament directors also used a day-segmented “Order of Play” approach that naturally kept those players from having significant overlap in schedules.
The way the Order of Play approach works is to schedule Singles match start times in the morning typically from 8 until 1130. Gendered Doubles are the domain of the afternoon with scheduled start times roughly between noon and 4. The “Special” event times are the fare of the evenings.
In fact, that schedule created a festive atmosphere at tournaments in the evening with people hanging out and watching the mixed doubles action. It created a sense of family and camaraderie within the active tournament players in Texas. We desperately need to bring that back.
Prohibiting divisional crossovers is killing tournament tennis.
This was a great read. Loved the structure and your perspective on this.
YES!!!!
Great job identifying the problem and offering a solution!