The Rules of Tennis
The World Tennis Number (WTN) is a new ITF global rating system for all tennis players, regardless of age, gender or ability. The USTA recently announced the adoption of WTN and has been conducting informational webinars on the forthcoming system. A couple of weeks ago, I attended one of those sessions and gathered some additional information about WTN from both the presentation and the question and answer session that ensued.
In case you missed my original post on this topic, “My First Take on World Tennis Number” ran last January. This post focuses exclusively on new information gleaned from the recent webinar.
The two presenters at my session were Michael Hughes and Matt Barnhart. Hughes is the USTA “Business Owner” of Tournaments, Leagues, and CT Data Products. Barnhart is the USTA Director of Recreational Competition. (I asked for an expansion of CT Data Products then failed to record the answer in my notes. It was something like Computing Technology.)
The USTA is adamant that there has been “tons of testing” on the WTN product by the ITF. Independent testing has also been performed by the USTA. It was specifically stated that there was 3-4 months of Quality Assurance testing. That is noteworthy since it is obvious that testing of other recent digital products of the USTA hasn’t been terribly thorough.
It was also asserted that WTN has already been integrated with the USTA tournament software and Serve Tennis. It still appears that WTN is only being used for selection and seeding. That implies a low complexity integration. Two test tournaments have been conducted using the WTN at the USTA National Campus.
I have to hand it to the USTA representatives who delivered the webinar: They managed to get through the body of the presentation without mentioning UTR. It was however raised during the Q&A session as there are undeniable parallels between WTN and UTR. There were questions asked along those lines during my session.
The possibility that WTN could be used for “banded” tournament groupings was shared during the webinar I attended. That would be a use case very much aligned with the way UTR tournaments are conducted. I would honestly prefer that they use that rather than NTRP and NTRP age divisions for adult tournament play. That doesn’t appear to be on the table at the moment. It should be.
WTN hasn’t solved the ratings initialization process for new and returning players. The USTA is considering a self-rating questionnaire styled after the one that has worked “so well” for NTRP. The instructions on how to get a WTN rating was to “just play.” USTA data is flowed to the ITF. That implies that the ITF manages the database of match results and calculations. My question asking who owned the data went unanswered.
The USTA intends that usage of WTN will always be free. That position was framed as a departure from how UTR is operated. Technically UTR also offers a free tier, but access to higher fidelity ratings requires an annual subscription. Universal Tennis, the operator of UTR, has to monetize somehow and doesn’t have the luxury of national organization subsidization.
It was strongly reiterated that USTA League play will continue to operate under the NTRP system that is not going away. WTN will also not impact USTA tournament rankings which will continue to be strictly points based. WTN will be used in tournaments for selection and all factors seeding.
The USTA representatives emphasized that they are interested in feedback and requested that it be sent to the worldtennisnumber@usta.com email address.
The staff presenting WTN at the webinar projected an infectious sense of enthusiasm and energy. The webinar gave me a sense of WTN optimism that I previously had been unable to muster. At the same time, I still don’t think it will make much of a difference to most adult recreational players. Most players are unlikely to even notice the deployment.
