Fiend at Court Unplugged
I am old enough to remember the days before the National Tennis Ratings Program (NTRP) system was in widespread use by the USTA. We were hearty stock back in those days. It took a lot of sheer strength to swing those racquet frames that were chiseled out of stone. The rich kids had racquets that were chiseled from granite. Good times.
The NTRP system was invented by the USTA Education and Research (E&R) office in 1978. The USTA officially created the league system the following year in 1979. The formalization of league play, as enabled by the NTRP system, fueled an explosive boom in USTA membership. Level-based play was the key to drawing increased and widespread participation in the sport.
As a concept,tennis league play was already well established before being brought under the USTA umbrella. Previously, level based play was broken down by the first three letters of the alphabet, A, B, and C. Some of the classic tennis books that I still cherish contain information and references to players by these alphanumeric labels.
The problem with the alphanumeric system is that there was tremendous variation in the strength of the players at any given facility. An “A” player at one club might be a “B” player (or perhaps even a “C” player) at another location. The categorization worked well within a tight population of players, but inter-club competition and tournament play using the alphanumeric categorization was problematic.
The NTRP system provided a national standard definition of playing capability that solved that problem. That standardization also provided the USTA with a lever to increase membership in the organization. The very first published set of league regulations contained 5 total rules. One of those was that the winners of local leagues would advance through a series of playoffs culminating with nationals. Nationals was the incentive for leagues to convert to USTA and thus the NTRP system.
At inception, the ratings levels consisted of the definitions of the playing characteristics and abilities of the players that are still evident in the current NTRP self rating guideline descriptions. This was very much a manual observation process when the system was created. The NTRP computer algorithm came much later.
The primary strength of the NTRP system is that it enables competitive play across a wide range of levels. As a sport, tennis has a fairly significant learning curve. Players new to the sport will generally be destroyed in competition by players who have more experience with the game. If competition only exists at the highest levels, then there is no meaningful way for new players to positively engage in the sport. The NTRP system fixed that problem.
The NTRP system is also a useful way to communicate playing levels of other forms of non-competitive tennis activities. Advertising tennis drills or group lessons by the NTRP level or range is way more effective than using generalized terms, such as “intermediate” or “advanced.” Like the alphanumeric system that the NTRP system replaced, there can be significant variation in those terms from facility to facility.
The USTA had been searching for a way to handicap tennis to level competitive play for a very long time. These efforts dated back to the 1890s. It took almost a century to find the solution of the NTRP system. It was innovative and effective and became the cornerstone of widespread play in the USTA. The NTRP system is the modern foundation of recreational tennis.
No system is perfect and NTRP is no exception. We will dive into the darker aspects of tennis surrounding the NTRP system tomorrow.
- Kimball, Warren F. (2017) The United States Tennis Association: Raising the Game, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska.
- 1999 USTA Yearbook, United States Tennis Association, White Plains, NY.
- 1980 USTA Yearbook, H.O. Zimman Inc, Lynn, Massachusetts
