Tennis News You Can Use
The USTA NTRP National Championships are officially in the books. The tournament included players who received endorsements for the Covid cancelled tournament in 2020 as well as new competitors who qualified for the event in 2021. The Singles brackets were played 9-12 April with 18+ in Surprise, AZ and 50+ in Orlando, FL. The doubles brackets were played 16-19 April with 18+ in Surprise, AZ, and 50+ in San Diego.
While these are logically four separate tournaments, there are some broad observations that are still applicable across all events.
Virtual Tournament Desk. All four events used a 3rd party app from matchtennisapp.com to handle the virtual tournament desk. This should go without saying, but this is the USTA, so… I will. The USTA should be developing long term roadmaps/plans to incorporate Virtual Tournament Desk functionality into their future best in class digital engagement platform.
The Virtual Tournament Desk Fallback Plan. The 3rd party app reportedly crashed at the 50+ singles in Orlando causing significant scheduling issues. Tournament directors need to be able to go “old school” to get matches on the court. It didn’t happen efficiently, and the tournament experienced significant delays.
Scheduling Fast 4 is Still an Issue. From what I gather from player comments sourced from all four sites is that with the exception of Orlando which was significantly worse, the tournament didn’t run behind schedule nearly to the extent that it has in previous years. There was only one direction to go. However, it does appear that there still isn’t enough time being estimated/projected for Fast 4 matches.
Improve Enforcement of Warmup Time. A player at one site observed that there were not enough roving umpires to enforce warm up times and that he was seeing some matches take up to 20 minutes before actually starting play. This is also a possible side effect of the virtual tournament desk and uncertainty as to when the warmup actually began. In other words, the umpires do not see two players walk onto the court together with the balls to start the clock.
The Tie-Break Game Scoring Format is (Still) Ambiguous. There were two versions of the tie-break procedures provided to players. One was on the tournament web page and the other was on a flyer taped up at the sites. The following image presents a side by side comparison. They do not directly contradict each other, which is actually surprising.
Neither source addresses the most significant ambiguity in the implementation of the tie-break game for doubles. Specifically which partner serves points 3 and 4 in the Fast4 tie-break game. There is a long explanation of the issue in “Tie-Break: Short Set vs Fast4” which ran on this site in February of 2020.
Finishing Shots
Congratulations to all who participated in the NTRP National Championships this year. The USTA seems to be committed to the absurdity of crowning National Champions in arbitrary tiers determined by a secretive computer algorithm. Consequently, it will likely be a fixture for years to come. The good news is that maybe the USTA is getting a little better about running this type of event.
