The Curious Case of the Missing NoHo

Fiend at Court Unplugged

Yesterday I ended the “The @USTATexas Qualified CTAs” post with a challenge to locate the undocumented qualified Community Tennis Association (CTA) that was missing from the USTA Texas CTA Directory. It’s North Houston (NoHo). NoHo regularly sends very competitive teams to the USTA Texas Sectional Championships, but does not appear at all in the CTA directory.

While NoHo has an independent league internet site, there is nothing on their pages that illuminates the organization other than adult league logistical information. The mystery is solved by examining the following excerpt from the Houston Tennis Association (HTA) page.

North Houston (NoHo) Leagues

North Houston is part of the CTA Expansion plan for USTA Texas. The majority of tennis facilities and locations for the NoHo leagues are in the Kingwood area, Bentwater, April Sound, The Woodlands, Humble, Spring and Tomball.

USTA/HTA Adult League Page

This opens a whole new can of worms. USTA Texas has a CTA Expansion Plan? And… exactly where is this mysterious April Sound that I have never heard of before reading that paragraph.

Pushing those things aside, I want to make it patently clear that I think that two automatic Sectional Advancement bids is absolutely the right thing for the region given the population of the area. That is a large part of the reason that I included the population numbers in yesterday’s qualified CTA table. It firmly justifies that outcome.

I can only speculate at what this means in terms of the 50 mile radius rule. In the absence of any additional information, it is my assumption that HTA operates two separate leagues under the same city center in Houston. Thus, there is not a missing circle from the map in yesterday’s post, but rather the circle around Houston is actually two concentric circles with the same radius.

As we have used the USTA Texas “50-mile” radius rule to as a backdrop to explore the relationship between the broader USTA organization and the CTAs, a recurring theme has been whether the rule “encourages and fosters” increased local league play. To that point, I have come full circle (see what I did there?) on my own thinking a couple of times.

I believe that the 50 mile radius rule was put into place to stop enterprising captains from creating an “all-star” team for the purpose of taking a highly competitive team to nationals. From my own local experience, I can attest that there is great resentment and sentiment against having to complete against perceived “all-star” teams. Explicitly I have been told that it is “no fun” to play against a stacked team.

Way back in “Tennis Participation: Leagues vs Tournaments” I wrote about the psychological differences between league and tournament players. In tournaments, every player/team loses their last match with the singular exception of the champion. Tournament players are somehow inherently more resilient against futility.

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 final match of the day. 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.

Players who prefer tournaments to league play are just wired a little differently. I think a large part of it is embracing the futility and inevitable final loss as an opportunity to learn and grow as a competitive player. As a player that vastly prefers tournaments to leagues, I do not have the same attitude toward the ringer teams encountered in leagues.

It is unfortunate that the response to player sentiment against “All-Star” teams was to create a mechanism such as the 50 mile rule. Another alternative would have been to try to shift player sentiment to one where the opportunity to play top-notch competition at the local level was reveled in rather than reviled.

As I shift my focus away from the 50 mile rule to more pressing matters for tournaments which demands immediate intention, I want to log one more realization about the rule. I believe that there is a secondary motivation to creation of the 50 mile rule.

There is a strong possibility that this rule was also enacted to support the viability of some of the smaller CTAs that are close to the major metropolitan areas. By limiting the number of players that can “flee” to the larger areas for play it encourages those players to stay local. Or at least it should. It doesn’t seem to be producing that effect at the moment.

1. NoHo Web Page, http://www.nohousta.com/, viewed 7/26/2020.
2. USTA/HTA Adult Leagues, Houston Tennis Association, https://houstontennis.org/adult-and-senior-tennis/usta-hta-leauges/ viewed July 25, 2020.