I played junior tennis tournaments growing up. The idea of not playing tournaments never occurred to me. I am not sure if electing to not play in tournaments was even an option. I played tennis tournaments because that was simply what my family did.
After my junior tennis career ended, I hung up my racquets and did not play a competitive USTA match for almost 28 years. This wasn’t really a conscious decision to stop the sport and I can’t really put my finger on the reason for the complete hard stop. I just kind of drifted away. That is the shortest version of the story. The full version will have to wait for another day.
The circumstances that brought me back to tennis are a long and serendipitous saga. The full version of that story will also have be deferred to another day. The important thing for this discussion is that my return was via tournament play. Tournaments were the only path that I knew or would have considered.
I play a lot of tournaments and have a strong preference for that format. At the same time, I play on and captain league teams. In the course of those two competitive pursuits, I am exposed to a wide variety of attitudes toward both tournament and league play.
I have been trying to figure out the Venn Diagram of tennis players who play tournaments and tennis players who play only leagues. I suspect for adult tennis the player distribution looks something like the following:
Based on my personal exposure and experience I perceive that there are a lot more league players than there are tournament players. At the same time I think that the majority of tournament players also play leagues. This leaves a small sliver of players who play only tournaments.
I looked to see if the Tennis Industry Association had produced a breakdown of league and tournament participation, but found nothing. While I could write a some code to scrape this data off the USTA TennisLink web site, I don’t have time to do so at the moment. It would make me really happy if someone with a valid data set could make it available to me so I could draw the Venn diagram with real data.
In the meantime, my best guess diagram leads to two obvious questions:
- Why are there so many league players who rarely cross over into tournament play?
- What attracts tournament players to tournaments in the first place?
One theory that I have heard bandied about is that tournament players have less of an interest in the social aspects of tennis than league players. That isn’t consistent with my own personal experience. The tournament culture in Texas is very social and convivial. I personally have done more direct socializing associated with tournaments than leagues.
I do think that there is more of an independent streak in tournament players. A player on a team is subject to the whims of their team captain and the availability of other players for playing opportunities. In a tournament, the individual decides what events to enter and exactly who they will be playing doubles with. There is something comforting about controlling your own destiny.
I think that there is also a psychological difference in handling defeat. In a tournament, every player/team loses their last match with the exception of the champion. Some people are perhaps not wired to accept the abject futility of tournament play.
Contrasting that with leagues illustrates the point. In league tennis, there are a lot more successful outcomes. A player can be happy with either an individual or a team win. Additionally in league play, half of the players win their match. It is significantly more likely that a day of league play will conclude with a win. In tournaments, almost everybody terminates the event with a loss.
To me, tournament players seem wired for individual accomplishment and are more sanguine about the lessons that can be only learned losing a tough competitive tennis match.
This sets the stage for continuing this discussion tomorrow. We will be looking very specifically at intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in tennis tournament players.
