Yep, it happened again, yet another undefeated team sent home at Southern California Sectionals

I'm growing tired of having to write these blog posts, but until SoCal USTA fixes their format and it stops happening, I'll keep pointing it out.

What is "it" you ask?

Southern California chooses to use the unflighted round-robin format for their Sectionals, at least for some divisions and levels, but does so with too many teams and not enough matches, leading to the possibility that more than four teams go undefeated and one (or more) of them get left out of making the semi-finals.

It has happened before in SoCal, just two months ago at 40 & Over Sectionals, and last year as well.  And this weekend it happened for the 18 & Over 3.5 women with 18 teams in the flight and each team playing just three matches.  That is a recipe for disaster and sure enough, there are five 3-0 teams.

I feel bad for SD WD LLW 3.5 Mtn View/ Jackie Saenz as they won their three matches, but it wasn't enough.  Now, they won each one 3-2 and so had the least impressive individual court record and that is the first tie-breaker in this case, and hopefully they knew going in winning 3-2 three times might not be enough, but that is still tough to swallow.

SoCal players, why do you stand for this?  Are you giving your section leaders your thoughts?  Or are you ok with it as is?

Note: I took a look and it appears that there was a greater than 6% chance there would be six 3-0 teams, and over a 23% chance of five 3-0 teams.