USTA Adult Tournament Framework 2020: Summary

Tennis News You Can Use

Since I first wrote “Innovate or Die: USTA Adult Tournament Structure in 2021,” pretty much every “Fiend at Court Unplugged” post has examined some aspect of the upcoming changes. Until the USTA publishes something new on this topic, or we start to see events scheduled under the new structure, it is time to move on. Before I do that, I want to create a single page that chronicles what has been written up to this point in time.

Transitioning Juniors Into Adult Tournaments

One of the claims of the new Adult tournament structure is that it will make it easier to transition juniors into adult tournaments. That logic was examined in “Seven and Seven: Transitioning Juniors Into Adult Tennis Tournaments.” That was followed up by my own solution to what I believe to be the real hurdle for juniors aging up into adult play in “Solving the NTRP Initialization Problem for Former Juniors.” This was followed up with “Radical Ideas for Bridging Juniors to Adult Tennis.”

It is extremely important to build the tennis participation pipeline. The population of players who age out of junior tennis can no longer be allowed to ride off into the sunset. I do think that creating commonality in the tournament structure and formats between juniors and adults will help.

At the same time, I do not think that a common structure is enough to overcome the primary reasons for why juniors don’t engage with adult tournaments. I hope that the leadership in the USTA also has that same awareness.

Promoting Adult Tennis Tournaments

Another claim of the new Adult tournament structure is that it will make it easier to market tennis to the consumer. This would be super exciting if this means that the USTA is actually about to start promoting Adult Tournament Tennis. From my perspective, marketing in the last decade is flat lined at zero.

The marketing and consumer market claims are dissected in “Marketing Tennis Tournaments: Putting Pen to Paper.” Rather obnoxiously, this was followed up with a two post series “Marketing Tennis Tournaments: Consumer Analysis” and “Marketing Tennis Tournaments: Consumer Analysis Part 2” which provided my own analysis of the adult tennis consumer market.

Related to this theme was “Learn To Play: Tennis vs Pickleball” which compared a consumer google query for “learn to play tennis” and “learn to play pickleball.” This example is a fairly damning indictment against the online USTA marketing of tennis to consumers who are not currently engaged in tennis. Pickleball is growing by leaps and bounds and a part of that reason is that the sport doing a much better job at marketing to the consumer than the USTA is.

USTA NTRP System

In retrospect, I spent an inordinate amount of time on the USTA NTRP System. I spent a full weekend trying to determine if the NTRP system is a strength or a weakness of the USTA. That theme was explored in “Cheating and Tanking and the USTA NTRP System (Oh my!),” “The Strengths of the USTA NTRP System,” and “The Weaknesses of the USTA NTRP System.”

It seems clear that the USTA has embraced the NTRP system as competitive differentiator in the consumer market. I believe that to be behind why adding layers of age separation within the NTRP levels. That line of thought was examined in “USTA NTRP Identity Crisis: Age Tiers.”

A lot of time was spent considering the impact of age divisions on player participation in “NTRP Tournament Age Divisions: Cold Hard Data,” “More USTA NTRP Tournament Participation Data,” and “NTRP Age Divisions and USTA Tournament Participation.”

Those articles focused on women’s NTRP tournament participation in Texas, which represents one of the largest tournament participation communities in the USTA. There is no evidence in that data that the historic splitting of NTRP levels into age tiers drove additional participation in tennis tournaments. This makes the USTA decision to continue to divide NTRP divisions into tiers even more befuddling.

I want off on a little bit of a tangent in “The Physics of Tennis Participation: Leagues vs Tournaments.” That article was an examination of whether or not the USTA is conflating participation in leagues with participation in tennis. I am grasping at straws to understand the strategic intent of age divisions within NTRP levels as applied to tournament tennis.

NTRP Nationals

I wrote relatively little about the NTRP National Championships during this time. In fact, “NTRP National Championships 2020 and 2021” might not have been mentioned at all if there had not been an update in news on the full cancellation of the 2020 event. That announcement also included the news that 2020 endorsees would automatically receive an endorsement to the 2021 event.

In 2021, there will be a single national rankings list for Adult tournaments under the unified system structure. I asked the question of the USTA as to whether this would impact selection for the NTRP National Championships. Specifically my question was whether each section would still receive an allocation into that tournament or whether selection would strictly be done off the national rankings list.

Selection will still be performed per a sectional allocation based on criteria determined by section. The Texas Section office has weighed in that they will continue to use the established selection criteria for that event.

I continue to believe that NTRP Nationals was created as an incentive for players to participate in tennis tournaments, much like the Texas Masters Championship tournament. In the course of analyzing data on the influence of age tiers, one side effect was observing that it does appear that the inception of NTRP Nationals slowed but did not reverse the attrition rate of players dropping out of tournament tennis.

USTA Organizational Themes

I am surprised at how much I wrote about USTA Organizational and strategic initiatives. “A Deeper Cut: USTA Restructuring and Player Development” documented the 5 strategic imperatives of the USTA’s ongoing restructuring initiatives. Those pillars are fundamental to understanding the context of how the Adult tournament initiative fits in with the overall USTA restructiring.

One of the five strategic imperatives was belabored in “The Trouble with TennisLink,” “TennisLink vs PlayYourCourt,” and “Imagining the next USTA Tennis App: Tournament Features.” This relates to the USTA effort to create a world class digital engagement platform. TennisLink , apparently on the cusp of being phased out is far from that.

Mixed Doubles

While grousing about the apparent elimination of mixed doubles was a recurring theme throughout much of what has been written in the past month, I was surprised that I did not write an article directly on the topic. I think this is because I view the decision as so patently bad that I am expecting that decision to be reversed at some point either before or mid-year in 2021. Maybe that is wishful thinking.

Most players in my orbit are reluctant to travel to a tournament to play only one event. It is unlikely that many players who have been playing doubles and mixed doubles in tournaments will convert over to the singles draw. It is more likely that some of those players will opt out of playing at all. I don’t see how eliminating mixed fits in with any coherent strategy designed to increase participation.

In my original post on this topic, it was observed that the USTA web page that contains all the news and information about the 2021 tournament changes inexplicably has a large picture of a man and a woman playing mixed doubles. At the time I commented that the USTA should consider changing that image, since mixed will not be offered as an event in conjunction with the announced changes on the page.

It has been a month since that observation was made, and the image has not been updated. I don’t know if this means that the leadership at the USTA is not listening or simply does not care. Maybe both. In any case, this is an example of tone deaf communication from the USTA National office that seems to be an ongoing problem.

Conclusion

In “Coming Full Circle with Senior Tennis” I wrote about what the new tournament structure initiative means in the context of my own tennis journey. I also touched on the importance of NTRP tournaments within the tennis ecosystem. If NTRP tournaments ceased to be a thing, I personally would not be impacted all that much. I am fine with Senior Open, Open, and UTR tournaments for competitive play.

At the same time, I believe that the loss of NTRP tournaments would be bad for tennis overall. It takes a lot of passion to write about this topic as extensively as has been done over the past month. In a related note, there is a fine line between passion and bat-shit crazy. By far, this has been some of the more time-consuming and emotionally draining topics to write about.

As this summary goes out, draws have been posted for Texas Sectionals which will be played next weekend. The field is 73% of the size of the competitor list in 2019. While participation at Sectionals has always been higher from people in the San Antonio and Austin areas, the competitor list is unusually concentrated in those areas this year.

I could not resist digging into those numbers a little more. Cross referencing the participant list from 2019 with 2020, only 206 players were common across both years. Thus, more than half of the field in 2020 did not play Texas Sectionals last year. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that COVID-19 is changing the tennis tournament landscape in Texas.

When the USTA rolls out the 2021 adult tournament changes, it will be to a very different world than the one we started with in 2020. It’s an uphill battle… and the hill seems to be getting steeper.

Resources

1. USTA 2021 USTA Adult Tournament Changes Webinar (YouTube Video)
2. USTA Adult Tournament Changes for 2021, USTA National Website.
3. Fiend at Court Request, USTA Texas, July 21, 2020, Full Correspondance