Based on the number of questions I have been receiving on the topic, Automatic Qualification (AQ) may be one of the least understood aspects of the NTRP National Championships. Starting with this year’s tournament, new rules and selection policies imposed by USTA National mean that it is suddenly more important than ever before that everybody fully understands exactly how AQ works. That includes players, tournament directors, Section administrators, and even people at USTA National.
Each USTA Section has a quota of automatic direct entries for each tournament division at the NTRP National Championships. Essentially, a number of players from each Section are guaranteed to get into the tournament as long as they enter.
(Sort of. In years past, some Sections have allowed non-resident players to compete in their AQ tournaments and keep that “Golden Ticket” to Nationals. I wouldn’t be too thrilled if my Section was handing out our allocation to non-resident players, but some Sections are doing exactly that. )
How are Golden Tickets Allocated to the Sections?
It isn’t exactly clear how AQ spots are distributed across the 17 USTA Sections. While the USTA National informational page acknowledges that a quota system is used, scant detail is provided beyond that it is based on NTRP tournament participation. Since some Sections have absolutely no tournaments but are still allocated one Golden Ticket, it is probably a safe assumption that every Section gets at least one by default.
Each section is given a specific number of quota spots based on NTRP tournament participation.
Excerpt from About NTRP: National Championships, USTA Informational Page, viewed 1/12/2023
In the past, I have advocated for the USTA to publish an annual list of the AQ quotas for each Section in the interest of transparency. With the recent changes in tournament selection policies, I believe that is needed now more than ever as players try to figure out whether they are likely to get into the event in advance of official notification of selection.
How Many Golden Tickets Are Allocated To Each Section?
Even though USTA National has not published a comprehensive list, it should be easy to look up the number of AQ spots based on each Section’s NTRP National Championship Qualification information page. Unfortunately, the majority of the Sections have not published that information. Additionally, some Sections do not have either an NTRP National Championship Selection page or a Point of Contact listed, which is extremely disappointing.
Given that, it is hardly surprising that many Sections routinely have not been filling their quotas. If you don’t effectively publicize the tournament to the Section’s players, fail to have a useful informational page, and/or don’t list a responsive Point of Contact, it is hard for me to imagine that people are going to manage to self-navigate to land their Section’s endorsement for the Golden Ticket.
To get up on my cranky soapbox for a minute, I was personally annoyed at the paucity of information published by each Section as I worked through this exercise while writing this post. I would think that publishing information about qualification for Nationals is something that USTA National could absolutely require of each Section.
On the other hand, when working on a project for the National Women’s Tennis Organization last year, I repeatedly tried to contact the Adult tournament POC from another Section (not Texas) and failed to ever get her to pick up the phone or answer an email. Perhaps I have experienced the same pain that the USTA is apparently encountering.
How Many Golden Tickets Are Available?
One of the foundational questions when determining the allocation for each Section is how many spots are available in the first place. This can almost, but not quite, be reverse-engineered from the NTRP National Championships “About” page published by USTA National.
Excerpt from About NTRP: National Championships, USTA Informational Page, viewed 1/12/2023
- Each division will consist of round-robin draws that will play into single-elimination draws. Where the player finishes in the initial round-robin will determine which subsequent single-elimination draw the player feeds into. All players regardless of their Round Robin finishing position will feed into a Single Elimination playoff draw.
- All 1st place Round Robin group finishers will play each other in a Single Elimination draw (the winner of this Single Elimination draw will be the National Champion)
- All 2nd place Round Robin group finishers will play each other in a Single Elimination draw
- All 3rd place Round Robin group finishers will play each other in a Single Elimination draw
- All 4th place Round Robin group finishers will play each other in a Single Elimination draw
- If there are not enough players/teams available to make more than one Round Robin, then a single Round Robin will be used, and the winner of this single Round Robin will be the National Champion.
Based on the format of the tournament from the inaugural year of the event as well as the 2023 Ranking System document (which is the one linked to on the USTA Adult Ranking System informational page), I believe that a “full” NTRP National Championship bracket consists of 32 entries. The ideal format apparently envisioned for the event consists of eight 4-slot preliminary Round-Robin pools. That is followed by a secondary 8-slot bracketed draw based on the order of finish from the first stage.
Unfortunately, I have never been able to figure out a Sectional AQ allocation that accounts for all 32 slots in the tournament. Based on a combination of what each Section has explicitly published about its quota, and supplementing that with the number of NTRP qualification tournaments that Sections ultimately conducted last year, I only have a fairly confident number for 9 of the 17 Sections. (There is a table at the tail end of the post summarizing my data.)
How Does Each Section Allocate Its Golden Tickets?
Based on the exercise of pulling that information, it appears that maybe half of the Sections that participate in the selection process use an AQ tournament where the winner walks away with a “Golden Ticket” for their guaranteed spot at Nationals. The remaining Sections use the National Standings List (NSL) to determine which players get their allocated AQ spot(s).
In the past, some Sections simply had players apply and would send a delegate based on a selection process that wasn’t clear. From the outside perspective, it kind of looked like whoever found out about the tournament and proactively reached out to their Section Office wanting to play. In many cases, the representative from the Sections had no tournament participation prior to selection for the NTRP National Championships.
The alternative method of selecting players for NTRP National Qualification is to use the rankings off the NSL. It appears that slightly less than half of the Sections are using that method. For reasons shared yesterday in “Rolling the Dice on NTRP Nationals,” the NSL as of the Wednesday before the tournament entry deadline will be used to make that selection.
That means that all players who are subject to Sectional NSL-based AQ selection will likely not know if they have been accepted into the tournament until after the entry deadline has passed. I see two ways that could be mechanized. Either the tournament director will simply pick the Section’s AQ players directly off the entry list based on the NSL, or each Section Coordinator will be asked to affirm their Section’s endorsements working off that same information.
That will likely be a process that is rife with the potential for error. For example, a player from Texas who is in the top 3 in the Section on the NSL but already has a Golden Ticket from Southern might be double counted. That could result in Texas getting one less AQ spot than its allocation. I can also see scenarios where whoever is doing the selection might accidentally pass over a player who is higher in the NSL in favor of a lower-ranked player.
Additionally, for the first time this year, if the full allocation of AQ endorsements is not fulfilled (as it has not been for the majority of divisions at the NTRP National Championship tournament in recent years), alternate players who entered the tournament may be selected off the NSL to bring the participants in the division up to the full 32.
We could see some situations where a player who should have been in the field was inadvertently omitted, yet all the spots were filled with at-large players before the error was detected. Alternatively, there is a real chance that someone relatively high on the NSL will not get in and incorrectly perceive injustice through a lack of understanding of the impact of the quota system for the AQ spots.
In addition, players who are relying on NSL-based selection into the tournament will basically be in the dark about whether or not they have been selected until after entries for the tournament have closed. Based on the paucity of data, I don’t know how a person could reliably determine where they sit in the selection order.
Sadly, There Is One More Complicating Factor
Another change for the 2024 NTRP National Championships is that players who earned a qualifying tournament AQ Golden Ticket and who were subsequently bumped up an NTRP level will still have their endorsement honored at the next higher division. If that happens, then that endorsement will not count against their Section’s quota. I am unsure how many players that will ultimately be, but the number is not zero.
This means that it is theoretically possible for a division to actually overfill with players entitled to their Section’s AQ golden ticket, whether through qualification tournaments or as one of the quota players selected off the NSL. It isn’t clear what the USTA will do in that instance.
Advice to Prospective Players
First and foremost, prospective players for the NTRP National Championships need to be fully aware that the entry deadline for this tournament is five weeks before the first day of play. That is much more lead time than is usually set for tournaments. I highly recommend submitting your entry now rather than waiting and potentially forgetting to enter. Based on the tight timelines and all the moving parts for selection, I doubt that late entries will be accepted. In fact, I would advocate strongly against allowing late entries of any kind.
In previous years in Texas, the culture was not to enter the NTRP National Championships unless the Adult tournament coordinator first notified you of the official selection. No one wanted to look like a fool for entering a tournament if they weren’t going to get in. Consequently, I am concerned that some players may wait for an official notification that simply isn’t coming.
Thinking through the timelines, the entry deadline for the Singles events is Thursday, February 29. That means that the NSL published on Wednesday, February 28, will be the one used for selection. That leaves zero time for a Section’s Adult Tournament Coordinator to contact all prospective players for the tournament to get them confirmed and locked in prior to the entry deadline the very next day.
I think the way this will work is that the Section coordinators will review the entry list after the tournament deadline has passed and identify which of their players who entered will receive the NSL-based AQ Golden Ticket. In other words, players signal their interest and intent to play if selected by entering the tournament rather than the previously used coordination mechanism. It is actually much more efficient than the manual methods used in the past.
Additionally, based on historic participation levels, there are likely to be quite a few at large spots in the tournament awarded to alternates directly off the NSL. Once again, it is probably a safe assumption that the only players eligible for that will be the ones who met the entry deadline but who did not receive their Section’s AQ Golden Tickets.
Players should mark their calendars and monitor the selection list that is published on the tournament page shortly after entries close. Anyone who expected to be selected and was left out should immediately contact both the tournament director and their section office for clarification.
Finally, everyone needs to understand that the USTA has made some significant changes this year and that there will likely be uncertainty and confusion in the short term. This is a time to assume good intent and to be patient with the mechanics. There may be hiccups this year, but it will get better.
If you want to play in the NTRP National Championships in 2024, don’t wait for an engraved invitation or that campy little Golden Ticket postcard. Enter now.
As an editorial footnote, I have noticed that the USTA tends to use AQ for players who win a qualifying tournament and NSL selection for everyone else. Yet, in other places, USTA National writes about the AQ quotas, including players from both populations. I think that is a sloppy use of wording that is terribly confusing. Consequently, in this post, I tried to be clear when writing about players who receive direct entry as NSL-selected AQ players versus others who might get into the event as NSL at-large players.
- About NTRP: National Championships, USTA Informational Page, viewed 1/12/2023
- 2023 USTA Adult Tournaments Ranking System, USTA hosted document, last viewed January 12, 2024.
| Section | Published Quota |
| Caribbean | ? |
| Eastern | 1 (QT) |
| Florida | 2 (QT) |
| Hawaii | ? |
| Intermountain | ? |
| Mid-Atlantic | ? |
| Middle States | ? |
| Midwest | 1 (QT) |
| Missouri Valley | 1 |
| New England | 1 |
| Northern | ? |
| Northern California | ? |
| Pacific Northwest | ? |
| Southern | 4 (QT) |
| Southern California | 3 (QT) |
| Southwest | 2 |
| Texas | 3 |
I learned the word paucity today đ.
Bravo for doing all the research and tackling a very complicated issue.
The Intermountain section director actually said they wonât be sending out invites at all since the tourney link is open to all this year, and said to go ahead and register and see what happens when it closes if you want to play. She didnât announce that publicly or in a mass email, it was only because a friend emailed about the rule changes that we know that. So Iâm sure a lot of people will miss the deadline waiting for an invite that isnât coming. Terrible. Also intermountain doesnât publish anything useful, but our quota is 2 and uses the NSL.
I almost reached out to ask you when writing this, but then I realized I didn’t have the level of commitment to try to do the same thing for all the Sections.
I’m trying not to go off in a rage post about the More information and POC list on the USTA National NTRP National Championship “information” page because it is chock full of missing links, and links that actually don’t point to a Sectional more information page as promised. And of course, at least one POC that I know for a fact doesn’t return calls or emails.
Yeah itâs really bad. I also reached out about mixed nationals to my POC and never got a response. I worry she doesnât know the answer to who qualifies and how since they pull from both the menâs list and the womenâs list. I wonder about sections with a quota of 1 – who gets to go?