The email from the USTA contains a link and the following text: “Thank you for playing in the USTA National Women’s 35, 45, 55, 65, 75, 85 & 90 Clay Court Championships in March. Would you please take a moment and share your experience?” I didn’t complete my survey until this week because I actually got tripped up by one of the questions.
When I click through to the link to the actual survey, the first question requires me to provide my email address as a mandatory field. Since I literally had to click on an email link to reach that form, this really feels like a situation where that information could have been auto-populated. I know my email address, so it was not a terribly big deal to complete.
The next question requires me to select the tournament. Since the email subject line and personalized text contained the tournament I participated in, I would kind of think this was already known by the USTA. The survey then presents a list of 50 (an exact number, not an exaggeration) tournaments to pick from. Additionally, all of these tournaments start out with an identical “USTA National…”
In other words, despite the fact that I received a personal and targeted email requesting feedback on a specific tournament, I still have to fill in all that information to complete the survey. Paradoxically, I can also successfully complete surveys for tournaments that I did not participate in. It also looks like some of the tournaments in the list have not (and potentially will not) be conducted this year. This raises all kinds of questions about data validation and sanitization. You can’t make good decisions with tainted data.
I have still yet to arrive at the crazy part, which is also the reason why I failed to complete the survey when it was originally received in May. The next thing I am required to do on this survey is to provide the dates of the tournament. Am I to understand that the USTA doesn’t know the dates of their Level 1 Tournaments? I have no idea why players would be expected to provide that or why it would even be necessary on the survey form.
Perhaps the survey is to determine if the Senior women tennis players actually remember the dates. If that is the case, then I failed back in May. This week I discovered that the survey accepts “2022.” From now on, I am simply going to enter the year. Quite frankly, I think there is a strong case for elimination of the date question altogether. I strongly suspect that some players don’t complete the survey due to the workload required to look up that information.
The actual survey questions are… narrowly focused. They are exclusively about the local venue. There are many aspects of the new USTA tournament framework, draws, and playing formats currently being debated at the National level. Data on player reactions and preferences in each of those areas would be very helpful to make effective data based decisions going forward.
I would hope that USTA National would absolutely want to know if the venue was doing a good job and meeting player expectations. However, I would also want to know what players thought about the tournament product that the USTA was providing at the Level 1 events. That data isn’t being collected, at least not through this survey mechanism.
The reason I am writing about this topic this weekend is because I am gearing up to launch my own survey data collection initiative very soon. Specifically, I will be checking the pulse of Adult player preferences on the USTA National tournament framework, scoring formats, and ranking point distribution systems. That means that this weekend is the last chance I have to harbor the illusion that creating a meaningful and enlightening survey won’t be terribly complicated. It is probably harder than I think.
Wish me luck… and… take the survey once it is released.
