The Naughty List: Reinvention

I am continually amazed and inspired by people who reinvent themselves to make profound changes in their lives. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that practice for personal development or improvement. However, reinventing oneself to ditch an unfortunate history of high performance for NTRP rating purposes is a quick way to land on my naughty list.

This reinvention process is when an existing USTA member creates a new membership with the organization rather than renewing. That essentially wipes the playing history clean because “new” members have not played before. It is unethical and wrong. Based on a couple of obvious instances that I have recently stumbled across, I am starting to wonder how frequently this happens.

In preparing for this post, I went partially through the process of joining the USTA as a brand-new player. I was astonished to discover that there is no check box for indicating previous membership before reaching the Self-Rating part of the process. That means that it is plausible that some people might accidentally create a second identity when attempting to renew an expired membership.

It is very easy to register a new account with the USTA and it should be. It is in our collective best interest to make joining as frictionless as possible. However, there has to be an integrity check at some point along the way. If a player decides to “start over” the USTA is probably expecting that other players will notice and alert the organization to the discrepancy. However, I can think of a couple of ways that a player could hide their actions if the secondary membership was intentional.

The first and most obvious way to create a new under-the-radar identity is a simple name change. Some women elect to update their last names as marital status changes. Name changes can also be done with first names. A person named William who goes by Bill can probably use the other name without attracting notice. Similarly, Christine could become Christie.

Geographic relocation is another opportunity to become a new person. Moving to a new area means no one will blink an eye at a self-rating because the player is new to that playing community. As an additional bonus, a lot of contact information including the postal address is updated when a person relocates. That makes it more challenging for the USTA to detect malfeasance.

I also thought through how a new account could be quickly “laundered” to turn a self-rating into an appealed rating. By establishing a self-rating lower than the desired level, that player could immediately appeal in the upward direction to “correct” that self-rating error. I don’t think any NTRP coordinator would think twice about approving that appeal-up request for a new self-rated player. Unless people are clicking into detailed playing histories, that would likely go undetected for an established player that did not relocate.

Once again, I observed that it is possible in the current registration process for a player to accidentally create a second USTA membership. One way to make that less likely is to add a step to the process where a player has to declare if they have been a USTA member in the past. A deliberate bad actor will of course fail to check that box, but in doing so shuts down “accident” as a defense.

I seriously doubt that the USTA is checking for this kind of fraud. Quite frankly I would rank doing that pretty low on the organizational priority list. However, I do think that the USTA might want to think through how to handle these types of discrepancies as they are identified.

That would include a way to “merge” two accounts for a player that made an honest registration error. Investigation and consequence procedures for potentially more nefarious scenarios should be defined. I am assuming that this would generally flow through the USTA League Grievance process. There is no specific mechanism for USTA tournaments.

The general playing community needs to know that this is a possibility. An attentive playing community is probably the best way for this specific issue to be detected and addressed.