The 2017 USTA League year has ended, lets start looking at some interesting tennis league stats! - Player participation round 1

Nationals for 2017 are complete and the USTA is calculating ratings.  While we wait, I thought it would be fun to start looking at some statistics.

In the past, I've looked at participation in the main Adult leagues and so that seems like a natural place to start.

What I'm looking at with this analysis is the number of unique players playing an Adult 18+, 40+, 55+, or 65+ match during the 2017 ratings year.  And for comparison, I'm just adding 2017 to the prior chart I did last year so we can see the trend since 2013.

Without further adieu, here is the chart.

We can see that it appears the slow decline in Adult league play continues into 2017.  The total participants dropped just over 7K, the women just under 5K and the men just over 2K.  The drops last year were smaller, about 3K total split evenly across the women and men.

So what does this mean?  Simply put, fewer players played in the Adult leagues this year than last.  Note that this is nationally, I will dig into some sections to look at trends there as last year, some sections like the Pacific Northwest and Southern Cal actually grew.

Note also that while participation in the Adult leagues has decreased, this is not looking at other leagues like Mixed, Tri-Level, Combo, or other secondary leagues a given section may offer.  It is possible there is just a shift from Adult leagues to other leagues.

And of course, USTA is not the only game in town.  Tennis playing in general may be up or down differently than the chart above.  But this is still an interesting set of data to look at.

What do you think?