Serve Tennis for USTA League Nationals Registration

The USTA has been working on what they call Serve Tennis, the site found with a Play Tennis URL, for a number of years, slowly rolling it out for more and more USTA events.  TennisLink is still used for USTA League for the most part (and I've heard nothing about when that might change), but Serve Tennis is used for registering for USTA League Nationals.

Serve Tennis has had some issues along the way as it was rolled out, so I was interested to see how it is working for an event like Nationals.

There are a few interesting quirks in using it for an event like this, I think due to Serve Tennis having been built, at least initially, and used for tournaments and not league play to this point.

One is that when signing up, even though you are on a team with singles and doubles courts, you are required to sign up for doubles as the only option.  The tournament page does explain this but it is an interesting quirk I'd think they'd fix soon.

Then after you register yourself, you are asked to find/assign/refer your doubles partner to sign-up.  This too is explained up front that you shouldn't do this but is a little extra noise one would hope wouldn't be there.

Another is that you are required to sign a waiver as you'd expect, but that is not done in Serve Tennis but instead in an entirely separate Jotform you have to copy/paste the URL in your browser to complete.  I'd hope this would be integrated into Serve Tennis in the future as I'm sure many will miss it and have to scramble to do it prior to playing.

But it worked!  Players are signing up for Nationals.

What has your experience been with Serve Tennis?

Pacific Northwest USTA League Sectionals / Playoff Update

This is a busy time of year for USTA League tennis as the current year has a flurry of playoffs, Districts, States, and Sectionals, and in those areas with Early Start Leagues, those are about to get started.  This is happening across all 17 sections, especially with Sectionals for 18 & Over and 40 & Over being completed or played very soon, and the PNW is no exception.

Over the past few weeks there has been just in my area/section:

• 18 & Over Sectionals in Portland two weeks ago
• 40 & Over Mixed local playoffs in Seattle a week ago
• 55 & Over Mixed local playoffs in Seattle a week ago
• One Doubles local playoffs in Seattle a week ago
• 40 & Over Sectionals in Portland this weekend

I was fortunate to be on teams involved in three of those, and had friends/family playing in all of them, a busy few weekends.

The weather did play a part in some of the events.  18 & Over Sectionals had great weather with sun and 80s or even 90s, but last weekend there was some rain Sunday causing some disruption to matches and scrambling to find indoor courts, but the USTA and volunteer staff did a great job of getting everything in.

I was at 40 & Over Sectionals this past weekend and the forecast looked ominous as we neared the event with a good chance of rain Friday.  Thankfully the USTA planned ahead and had enough indoor courts available that they were able to make the call to play pro-sets and juggle the schedule a bit to get all of the Friday matches in.  There was rain early in the morning, and then a few showers so while some play could have occurred outside, it would have been interrupted and hectic while the adjusted indoor schedule went smoothly.  The rest of the weekend was fine with just a short delay Saturday morning as the courts had to try from a brief overnight shower.

What areas won Sectionals this year?

For the 18 & Over we had:

• 2.5 women - Eastern Washington/Deery beat Northern Oregon/Shin 2-1 in the final
• 2.5 men - Northwest Washington/Li won the round-robin going 4-0
• 3.0 women - NWW/Kim beat NOR/Agrawal in the final 3-2
• 3.0 men - NWW/Box beat NWW/Wang 5-0 in the final
• 3.5 women - NWW/Hawkins beat NWW/Lee 4-1 in the final
• 3.5 men - NWW/Powers beat NWW/Mar 4-1 in the final
• 4.0 women - Southwest Washington/Mettler beat Alaska/Welch 3-2 in the final
• 4.0 men - NWW/Maki beat NWW/Low 3-2 in the final
• 4.5 women - NOR/Affentranger beat NOR/Graham 3-2 in the final
• 4.5 men - NWW/Huang beat NWW/Liu 3-2 in the final
• 5.0 women - NOR/Donato won the round-robin going 3-0
• 5.0 men - NWW/Condiotty beat NWW/Purohit 3-0 in the final

So NWW took 8 of the 12.

In the 40 & Over this was the result:

• 2.5 women - SWW/Oie beat EW/Brown 2-1 in the final
• 2.5 men - NWW/Li won the round-robin 3-0
• 3.0 women - NWW/Perret beat NOR/Lee 2-2 on the games tie-breaker (4) in the final
• 3.0 men - NWW/Wang beat NWW/Khullar 3-1 in the final
• 3.5 women - NOR/Cowling beat NWW/Holland 3-1 in the final
• 3.5 men - NOR/Larsen beat NWW/Agrawal 2-2 on the sets tie-breaker (1) in the final
• 4.0 women - Southern Oregon/Kelly beat NOR/Huynh 3-1 in the final
• 4.0 men - NWW/Sharma beat NWW/Robey 3-1 in the final
• 4.5 women - NWW/Corsano beat NWW/Lao 2-2 on the sets tie-breaker (1) in the final
• 4.5 men - NOR/Borosky beat NOR/McGarity 2-2 on the games tie-breaker (3) in the final

Here NWW took 5 of the 10.

And yes, our section still uses 1 singles and 3 doubles for 40 & Over so we have to deal with the 2-2 ties.  And some of the 3-1 wins were exceedingly close with match tie-breaks being two of the wins where either going the other way would have reversed the result with the 2-2 tie going to the other team on the games tie-breaker.  Very close!

And there are more Sectionals coming up with Mixed 40 & Over and Mixed 55 & Over in just over three weeks.

Congratulations to all that played, competed, and won!

It happened again, SoCal has an undefeated team sent home from Sectionals

I wrote several months ago that the SoCal section appeared to be running their Sectionals using an unflighted round-robin format that was begging for an undefeated team to be sent home.  Well, it happened again this weekend's 40 & Over Sectionals.

The 3.5 women had a whopping 18 teams in the flight, and only three matches scheduled for each team which creates a very good chance of the situation to happen.  For comparison, there is a small chance of it happening at Nationals (and it has happened), and there they have 17 teams playing four matches so you can only imagine the risk goes way up with an additional team and one fewer match.

The way things played out, there were five undefeated teams and only four could advance, so one was sent home.  Here were the standings:

1. OC LLW - 3-0 / 15-0 / 30-2 / 177-67
2. SFV - 3-0 / 10-5 / 21-11 / 149-117
3. V-WD - 3-0 / 10-5 / 21-13 / 145-118
4. BC - 3-0 / 9-6 / 19-14 / 157-118
5. SD - 3-0 / 9-6 / 21-14 / 153-130

So SD was left out, and worse, the broken standings tie-breakers bit them too!  The tie-breaker is sets lost and BC and SD were tied, and the USTA chooses to ignore sets won and goes straight to games lost where SD and lost more games.  Well, given they played, and won, two more sets, one can understand how they would have lost more games.

What do you think?  Was SD given the short end of the stick and unfairly left out of the semis?  Or every team knew the rules and just needed to play better.