Planning line-ups for USTA League playoff matches - Singles vs doubles, stack or not? Reports can help!

When teams make it to USTA League playoffs, line-ups become especially important.  Not that they aren't during the regular season of course, but during the regular season it is often more about getting players matches and managing folks availability over the course of the season.

But come playoffs, teams need to make a decision about getting everyone in matches, only playing the best players, or trying to blend those two in some way.

Good captains will have set an expectation with their rosters from the start of the year what the team's goals are and if everyone will get (relatively) equal playing time or if, especially come playoffs, preference will be given to the best players.  Doing this early can avoid a lot of angst and drama (but not all of it!), and just make the captains job easier.

Regardless of the approach, if a team wants to maximize their chances of winning, captains need to decide how to go about getting three court wins for each match.

First, not all teams are created equal.  If a captain knows who the tougher teams are, they can make sure they have their best players in the line-up for those matches, and they can perhaps rest a better player and get a weaker player in a match against a weaker opponent and not risk losing the team match.

Next, some teams have stronger singles than doubles, or stronger doubles than singles, and USTA rules do not require that stronger players play on court 1, so captains are allowed to juggle their players as they see fit.

In general, teams with strong singles players have an advantage as they can potentially get two court wins from just two players.  Just one strong doubles pair is then needed, or at least getting the best pair a favorable match-up, and one can get the three court wins from just four players.

But some teams don't have two strong singles players, or when facing another team that also has them, the two singles wins are not guaranteed, so captains must get more creative.

A common practice is to put one's strongest singles players on court 2 singles planning to get a win there, and then plan to get two doubles wins.  It may be a team has strong doubles players and can play straight-up (both pairs on courts 1 and 2) and be reasonably assured of wins, but sometimes a weaker team will try to "steal" a win by putting their weaker singles player on court 1 and weakest doubles pair on court 1 as well.

Another technique when one thinks they are overmatched at singles is to load up on doubles.  This is far riskier as it requires a team win all of the doubles, but doing so may give them their best chance if playing their best players in singles is likely to result in losses anyway.  And this strategy did work for a couple teams at recent PNW 18+ Sectionals that won 3-2 on just the doubles.

Obviously, this "stacking" of a line-up is not a new concept and opposing captains know it may happen, so they will counter any expected line-up juggling with their own and you can find the "#1 singles" guys playing each other on court 2, or the best doubles pairs facing off on court 3.

So what is a captain to do?

Some just roll their players out how they have all year, they advanced thus far and if it ain't broke don't fix it.

Others will scout their opponents and try to determine what to do, but some captains will have juggled things all year to make that hard to do.  But most teams, even if they intend to make it random, do have tendencies, particularly in playoffs.  And strong teams often don't need to stack at all, they will win regardless, and many captains think they are a strong team so this leads to them sticking with the tendencies they've established.  So if an opposing captain can identify those they can use it to their advantage.

To help with identifying these trends and tendencies, I started generating flight reports several years ago.  In their latest incarnation, these reports give a captain several great pieces of information:

• The full roster average for each team.  With this, a captain can see who the stronger/weaker teams are in general and who the deepest teams are.  With this in hand, an overall plan of when to play stronger/weaker players can be established.
• The average for the top-8 (or top-5 if three courts are being played) players on the team.  This tells a captain who is strongest/weakest if their best players are played which can also give guidance on general line-up planning.
• The average rating of who played by court.  This can clearly show a teams tendencies and if they are stronger in singles or doubles, if they stack, and if so on what courts.  Some teams look balanced and are hard to predict, but most teams have definite tendencies.  And since the report breaks these averages out by regular season and playoffs, you can see how they change when the matches matter more.

But to make use of this info, a captain has to also understand their own team so they can actually get the advantageous match-ups.

At a high level this is usually pretty obvious, team practices and actual records and match results don't lie, you usually know who the better players are.  But there is sometimes more than meets the eye as some will do very well in practice against teammates they know well but not as well in matches against unfamiliar players.  Or some gaudy records may have been racked up against weak opponents and the player isn't really as strong as thought.

And when pairing doubles partners, unless the captain is going with the same tried and true pairings all the time, it can be useful to know who actually plays the best with who.

The flight report gives some of this info, a captain can see if they really are stronger in singles or doubles, or if the stacking they thought they were (or weren't) doing actually holds true.  But to get more details, I offer team reports that give my estimated rating for each player on a roster, what their rating was at the start of the year, what it was before their most recent match, and their record and courts played on the team.  It also includes the partner report that shows how each player's matches have rated with different partners so you can see who plays best with who.

Whether for your own team or an opponent, this gives insight to help plan line-ups and even match strategy as your players can know who the stronger/weaker player is and thus who to target from the start of the match.

I generate any of my reports on request and can customize or tailor them to specific needs and offer discussion and suggestions on how best to use the information.  I do charge for them as generating accurate ratings does involve some time and effort, but most reports end up costing the equivalent of a cup of coffee per member of your team so really are a great value if you want to maximize your chances in playoffs.  It seems like a no-brainer to spend a few bucks to give yourself a chance of making a playoff weekend not just a fun but also a winning experience.

And yes, they work.  Over the past 4-5 years many report customers have advanced to and even won Nationals, often doing better than expected in part because the reports helped them plan effectively.  Last year, a report customer won Nationals and was arguably the underdog in three or four of their five matches, but the won all five, four of them just 3-2, by knowing the tendencies of their opponent and getting favorable match-ups to perhaps "steal" a win.

And from personal experience, a team I captained won our first match at Sectionals 5-0 in part because I got the match-ups I wanted, and then I knew we were playing a team loaded at singles so I loaded up in doubles.  I got the match-ups I wanted again and we won two of the doubles courts, but the third went to a match tie-break and my guys came up just short.  But it was the right strategy, I'd take my guys in that match again any day, and had I tried to win a singles court with another player who played doubles, we might have lost 4-1 rather than 3-2.

In a match between closely rated teams, how the players do on that given day is obviously a big factor, but putting them in the best position to win can be the difference between a team win or loss.

There is still plenty of time to get reports for any phase of playoffs remaining this year.  If interested, contact me via e-mail or on Facebook or Twitter.