What USTA League players will be bumped up/down Monday when ratings are published?

The USTA League season wrapped up back in November and now that we've had Thanksgiving, it is time for year-end NTRP ratings to be published!

Word is that ratings should be published on Monday December 2nd, my guess is towards the end of the day, and a lot of people will be interested to see where they end up.  Some players had good years and are anticipating (or afraid of?) being bumped up, others had middle of the road seasons and expect to stay the same, while others perhaps had losing seasons and are afraid (or hoping?) for a bump down.

My ratings, while not perfect, are a very good indicator of where a player's rating will end up, and I can do still do reports for player's wanting to see where they will end up, or looking for an explanation of why they ended up where they did.

But, we can also look historically at some statistics of how past years have ended up to get an idea of what will happen this year.

What follows is a table showing bump down/up percentages by year and level for the past few years.

	2018		2017		2016
Level	Up	Down	Up	Down	Up	Down
2.5	35%	0%	32%	0%	29%	0%
3.0	14%	3.1%	14%	2.9%	14%	3.1%
3.5	7.6%	4.1%	7.2%	4.0%	7.8%	3.7%
4.0	4.7%	5.9%	4.3%	5.7%	4.8%	5.2%
4.5	4.4%	8.2%	3.9%	8.3%	3.6%	7.8%
5.0	1.9%	17%	1.6%	17%	1.7%	17%
5.5	0.7%	39%	0%	36%	0%	45%

We see the percentages are quite consistent for most levels, but in general there have been a slight increase in bump ups the past two years, and the bump downs have also had a small increase at several levels.

But given how consistent the bump percentages have been, it is probably pretty safe to assume 2019 will show very similar bump percentages as shown above.

Stay tuned, I'll be posting more stats and observations once year-end ratings are published.

Update: Updated the above table in this post adding in 2019 for comparison.

USTA Tournament NTRP Nationals begin this weekend

Starting last year, the USTA began holding Nationals events for NTRP tournament players and is continuing with the offering this year.  In fact, the events begin this weekend with the 18 & Over singles in Naples, FL, and the 50 & Over singles in Surprise, AZ.  Next weekend finds the doubles events for both groups at the same sites.

Players and pairs will have qualified following the rules outlined in their section, often by accumulating points playing NTRP tournaments during 2018, and perhaps then playing in a Sectionals tournament to determine the top players that get to advance.

The format for the events are up to 32 players being put in up to 8 flights for three round-robin matches each, followed by the 8 flight winners advancing to a standard quarter-finals, semi-finals, and final.  In order to get all the matches in, potentially six over the 3-day weekend, the events use the Fast Four scoring.

Players qualify to play at a given level based on having either a 2017 or 2018 year-end rating at that level.  This means that a 2017 year-end 3.5 who played 3.5 level tournaments all year and got bumped up to 4.0 at 2018 year-end is still qualified to play at the NTRP Nationals at the 3.5 level.  I believe the rationale is that this is the Nationals event for players who qualified during 2018, so might as well let them continue to play at that level they were eligible for during that year.

Note that I believe it also allows a player who was a 4.0 during 2017 but got a 3.5 2018 year-end rating to be eligible at the 3.5 level, but I'm not sure how many sectionals qualifying and selection criteria would provide a path for these players at the 3.5 level.

The feedback I heard from last year's event was that it was very good, even if the Fast Four format was a little new/short/quirky for some.  There will be some players that are looked at as sandbaggers, particularly those players that were bumped up at 2018 year-end but are still playing at their lower level, but that is just the nature of any Nationals event.

What do you think?  Are you going?  Do you wish you were going?  What was the qualification process like in your section?

USTA Adult League Participation by Section 2013 thru 2018 - A few sections not declining, but most are

I wrote about the general Adult league participation trend last week, and noted the continued decline, but the trend is not the same across all of the sections.  It seemed that looking at the trend by section would make sense, so here goes.

The chart below is the largest I've made, but I didn't want to create 17 separate ones for each section, so you get it all in one.  The chart shows the participation in the Adult leagues from 2013 thru 2018.

One thing really stands out, and that is that Southern has far more participation than any other section, which makes sense given it cover so many more states than any other section.  But seeing in a chart really makes the point.

But Southern is also the section that is showing the greatest decline from over 81K to just over 71K in the 5 years this analysis covers.  But nearly every section has declined, a few exceptions being Southern Cal, up over a thousand over the period, Pacific Northwest up several hundred, but down a bit from 2017 to 2018.  Southwest was largely flat, and a few others had small declines, but most have dropped several hundred to thousands over the period.

What do you think?  Are you seeing participation trends like the above in your area?

What if NTRP ratings were gender neutral? A hypothetical NTRP level distribution

As part of my year-end stats series of posts, I looked at year-end distribution by level, overall and by men and women, focusing on the change from 2017 to 2018.

What I didn't show in a single chart was how the men's and women's counts compare in the same chart.  Here that is.

We can see that more women play than men, and women make up well over half the population at a level until you get to the 4.0 level, when the men get close to 50% and at 4.5 there are more men than women.  No big surprises here, the most players are at the 3.5 level by a significant margin, then 4.0, then 3.0.

A sometimes discussed topic is how men and women of the same level compare, or what a gender neutral league might look like.  Yes, there is Mixed league today, but that isn't really gender neutral as male/female pairs play each other, you never have a man playing a woman in singles or unbalanced doubles.

The USTA does not include any play between the genders for Adult/C ratings, so there is nothing in the NTRP system to tell us that a 3.5 man and 3.5 woman are or aren't the same.  But it is generally understood that a male of a level will on average be stronger than the female of the same level.

A common hypothesis is that a male player of the same level is about one level (0.5 NTRP rating) higher than the equivalent female, e.g. a 3.5 male and 4.0 female are probably of similar ability.  The reality is that that isn't true at every level, at least it isn't an exact 0.5 difference, and certainly there are exceptions, but it is a rough rule of thumb one can use, and one exact level makes my analysis below easy, so we'll go with it.

So we can imagine for a minute, what the distribution by level might be if we had gender neutral ratings by simply adding 0.5 to all the male players, e.g. shifting the blue segments of the chart above down a column.  Rather than making you do the mental exercise, here is that chart.

By moving the 3.0 men to 3.5, and 3.5 men to 4.0, etc. we see a change in the distribution.  There are now nearly as many "4.0s" as "3.5s", and nearly as many "4.5s" as "3.0s".  We also see that women would out number the men through "4.0" and only at "4.5" would there be more men than women.

If we had gender neutral ratings, then gender neutral leagues could more easily be played and it appears that the "4.0" level would be very competitive with nearly equal men and women being eligible for the level.  All the others would have a significant bias towards more women (3.5 and below) or men (4.5 and above).

I don't think any of the above is going to happen any time soon.  NTRP is not suddenly going gender neutral nor are gender neutral leagues in the offing, at least to my knowledge, so all of this is just a hypothetical what if.  But seeing the distribution above, would you be interested or willing to play in a gender neutral league?  Or do you like things the way they are now with Mixed the only league where men and women play and then only as pairs against each other?

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - bump rates by league/division played

A common question I get is whether a 55 year-old 4.0 is the same as a 25 year-old 4.0.  The short answer is yes, they are supposed to be.  But there is a lot behind that answer.

I say yes because the NTRP system is based on match results.  If a 55 year-old plays a 25 year-old, the result of that match will be factored in to each player's rating and the relative ratings between them should be accurate.  If the 25 year-old 4.0 is better than the 55 year-old 4.0 and wins easily, the 25 year-old's rating will go up, the 55 year-old's will go down.  If either goes up or down enough, they could be bumped up or down at year-end.

Correspondingly, anyone that plays either of those players will have their rating calculated appropriately.  If the 55 year-old is a "low" 4.0, then wins against that player won't rate as high as a win against the "25 year-old "high" 4.0.

Now, for this to work, there must be some amount of play between the older/younger players so the groups are "connected" so to speak.  This generally happens enough, a fair number of 55+ players do play 18 & Over, or the 55+ players will play 40 & Over and there will be 40+ players they play there that play 18 & Over.

But there still seems to be a perception amongst some that the ratings don't get it right, and some 55+ players have inflated ratings and when they play against a 25 year-old of the same level, it isn't a competitive match.

Now, there is a lot more to a match than just comparing ratings, one player may be a "high" at-level player and another "low", so a 6-2,6-2 win for the 25 year-old may be expected.  Similarly, if they play singles and the 55+ player has achieved their rating from primarily doubles but isn't as strong a singles player, that may explain it.  And playing styles and how those match up is always a factor.

Generally, you might expect players ratings to gradually drop as they age and so the older players may be in the lower part of the range for their level.  But at the same time, if they are going down and just got bumped down, they may be in the higher part of the range for their level..

All of this begs the question, what are the bump rates among players of different ages?  Unfortunately I don't have player's ages, but we can use the league/division they play in as a proxy for age.

Below are charts that show the bump up/down rates for players based on the division they played in.  Note that players aged 40+ and 55+ can play in the lower age divisions so they may be counted potentially in each division.

First, for the women.

We do see that players that play 18 & Over are bumped up a lot more, nearly 2.5 times more, than down.  The 40 & Over division is similar but closer to 2 times more.  But the 55 & Over has a significant drop and there are slightly more bump downs than up.

This is largely as you'd expect given I noted above that older players will eventually see their skills or mobility diminish, and you'd expect younger players to have a higher ceiling to improve into.  It is perhaps surprising those in 40 & Over are still bumped up over twice as much as down, but that is likely due to some players picking up the game in their 40's and having room to improve.

Next, for the men.

We see a very similar trend.  So similar I don't really have much to add.

But the above is across all levels and that is where you may see new players at any age still improving along with those on the decline.  What about if we look at the higher end of the levels, say the 4.5 level for the men?

Interestingly, we see more bumps down than up in every division, although the ratio definitely gets larger as you move up in age.  It is especially interesting and surprising for at least me, that even for those age 55+ that there are more than 2% that play in that league bumped up.  If we are to believe the ratings, more than 2% of 55+ players are still improving, and improving enough to cross the threshold to be a 5.0!

I'm certainly not going to say that older players can't improve, but improving from a 4.5 to a 5.0 is a pretty tall task and 1 in 40 4.5 rated players age 55+ doing it seems a pretty big ask.

One might ask if the USTA is inflating or keeping some older player's ratings too high?  I know I've heard from some older players that have been bumped up saying there is no way they can play against younger players at 5.0, it almost becomes a safety issue, and there are few or limited playing opportunities for a 55+ 5.0 player.  The result is they can't play much and are stranded, or have to somehow find a way to play younger players and get killed (hopefully not physically!) to get their rating adjusted and get bumped down.

I don't know that the USTA does this, but I could see some reasoning being that if you don't bump players up, or let them be bumped down, it is unfair to the lower rated at-level players to have stronger ones beating up on them, and you end up with a glut of players with too large a range at a given level.  One solution to avoid the glut at a level would be to bump more of those lower rated within players down, but since everyone has at least a bit of an ego, those bumped down might not like the idea of that or having to play at the lower level won't be fun for them and decide to quit playing USTA League.

What do you think?  Are older player's ratings inflated a bit?  Is there not enough "connectedness" between the age groups for the system to work as hoped?  Or is the USTA just keeping players rated at higher levels to avoid a glut of 55+ players at the 3.5 and 4.0 levels that don't want to be bumped down?

Update: For completeness, here is the same chart as above for the 4.5 women.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - 3.0 men bump rates by section

Continuing with my analysis of year-end ratings and bump rates, here are the bump rates for the 3.0 men by section.

At approaching 60% of 3.0 men bumped up, Caribbean again leads.  This is a huge number of bump ups, I don't know I've ever seen such a high rate at the 3.0 or above level.  So we again do the chart without Caribbean.

There are some high bump rates here too, higher than the 3.0 women in fact, most sections around/over 15%.  Hawaii is approaching 30% though which is quite high, and New England, SoCal, Florida, and Texas are around/over 20% too.  There are still some bump downs, but very few.

More to come.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - 3.0 women bump rates by section

Continuing with my analysis of year-end ratings and bump rates, here are the bump rates for the 3.0 women by section.

Caribbean again leads, and is well over 45% at this level, but if anywhere, the lower levels are where you'd expect high bump rates.  Regardless, we again do the chart without Caribbean.

There are a lot of higher bump up rates here.  Every section other than Middle States and Eastern are over 10%, and Northern and Southwest well over 15%.  There are still a not insignificant percentage bumped down though, most sections around 3-4%.

More to come.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - 4.5 men bump rates by section

Continuing with my analysis of year-end ratings and bump rates, here are the bump rates for the 4.5 men by section.

Caribbean again leads, at just over 45% at this level which is surprising given that as the levels goes higher the trend typically switches from more bumps up to more bumps down.  So we again do the chart without Caribbean.

Here we see the largest percentage bump goes to Hawaii 4.5s being bumped down at over 13%.  They still had over 3% of their 4.5s bumped up though.  Middle States, Midwest, and New England also had a lot of bump downs, so look for them to perhaps have strong 4.0 teams next year.

The largest percentage of 4.5s bumped up goes to SoCal, and almost more up than down.  Mid-Atlantic, Missouri Valley, and NorCal were close behind.

More to come.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - 4.5 women bump rates by section

Continuing with my analysis of year-end ratings and bump rates, here are the bump rates for the 4.5 women by section.

Caribbean again leads, and is back over 40% at this level which is surprising given that as the levels goes higher the trend typically switches from more bumps up to more bumps down.  So we again do the chart without Caribbean.

We see as we get to the 4.5 level, every section (not named Caribbean) had more bumps down than up.  The closest to break even was Florida and Pacific Northwest was fairly close too.  Hawaii, Southwest, and Midwest were all very lopsided towards bumps down.

It is interesting though that Midwest made the 18 & Over final and still gets this many bumps down.  PNW won 40 & over so can understand their position, but Southern did well in both events and still has nearly twice as many bumps down than up.

More to come.

USTA Adult League Participation 2013 thru 2018 - The decline in unique players continues

USTA League Nationals are done for 2018 and year-end ratings have been published, and I've been analyzing bump up/down rates in a variety of ways and that will continue, but lets take a break to do a related analysis and look at participation numbers for the past year compared to prior years.

For this analysis, I'm looking at unique players that played a match in the Adult leagues which includes 18 & Over, 40 & Over, 55 & Over and 65 & Over during each ratings year, which is roughly November thru October.

This does not include any participants in Mixed, Combo, Tri-Level or other secondary leagues.  Including those may change the trends and I'll try to look at those as well.

I've been doing this analysis for a few years and so I'm just adding 2018 to prior years so we can see the trend.  So here goes!

What we see above is that while there are still more than 250 thousand unique players in Adult leagues, the trend from 2013 continues and there is a decline overall and amongst the men and women.  Overall, participation was down 3.9%, and the women's and men's decline was each also 3.9%.  This is unfortunately the largest drop for any one year period over the past five years.

Now, while nationally there is a drop, that doesn't mean participation is declining in all areas or in all leagues.  This is looking at just the main Adult leagues and in past years, 40 & Over and 55 & Over have been growing with 18 & Over shrinking.  Here is what that now looks like adding in 2018.

First, here is participation in just 18 & Over.

This is still the largest division with over 190 thousand participants, but we see significant decline here of 4.2% overall, 4% for the women, and 4.4% for the men.

Here is 40 & Over.

This tells a different story with growth from 2013 thru 2017, but for 2018 that is gone and there was an ever so slight decline.

Here is 55 & Over.

Here we see steady growth but a flattening in 2018.  Overall, women, and men all grew, but the men were up 10 players, and the women only a few hundred.

The working hypothesis I've floated in previous years is that the USTA membership is aging and that fueled the growth in 40 & Over and 55 & Over, as more players became eligible, but those players have begun to play less 18 & Over and they are not being replaced by new under 40 players.  This seems to still be the case, and now even 40 & Over has shown a very small decline which would seem to indicate players that have played in the past are choosing not to now.

Again, as I noted above this is looking at just a slice of USTA League play.  I will look at the other leagues soon to see if there are pockets of growth there.  A notable one is the new 18-39 league as that is hopefully an area we will see growth and will pull in younger players.

Also, some areas have shown growth in recent years, while others are declining faster than the national averages above.  I'll look at that too.

What are your thoughts on the decline?  Is it real in your area?  What are ways to turn it around?

Stay tuned for more.

Note: These are statistics from the data I've gathered and may not exactly match the USTA's data or they may report numbers using different criteria than I am.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - 4.0 women bump rates by section

Continuing with my analysis of year-end ratings and bump rates, here are the bump rates for the 4.0 women by section.

Caribbean again leads, but at just under 30% this is significantly lower than the other levels/genders I've posted so far.  So we again do the chart without Caribbean.

The thing that stands out here is that nearly every section had more bump downs than up, over three times more in one case in Texas.  Several others are close to even, but the predominant trend is that more 4.0s were bumped down than up.

With Texas having more than 7.5% bumped down, perhaps look for them to be strong at 3.5 Nationals next year.  Southern had nearly 7.5% bumped down too which is surprising considering they made the semis in 18 & Over and the final in 40 & Over, but it is a very large section so can certainly have different trends by state.  But Midwest also won 18 & Over and they have a pretty high bump down rate too.  Eastern did win a Nationals and has the highest bump up rate.

More to come.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - 4.0 men bump rates by section

Continuing with my analysis of year-end ratings and bump rates, here are the bump rates for the 4.0 men by section.

Once again, Caribbean dominates the chart so below is the chart without them.

Now we can more clearly see the variation and that Hawaii had an abnormally large number of bump downs this year at over 9%, but still had more than 6% bumped up.  The largest percentage of bump ups was interestingly in Northern at nearly 7.5%.  Given that they didn't make the semis in either 18& Over or 40 & Over that is a surprise.

Caribbean did make the final in both events winning one so I'm sure that contributed to their high rate, but Southern and Florida were the other finalists and Florida did have a high bump up rate but Southern not as much as some others.

More to come.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - 3.5 men bump rates by section

Continuing with my analysis of year-end ratings and bump rates, here are the bump rates for the 3.5 men by section.

As we've seen with all the by section statistics, Caribbean's bump rates set new standards and at nearly 40% of 3.5 men being bumped up skew the chart so much I get to do one without them to see more detail for all the other sections.

Here we see that Mid-Atlantic at nearly 12% of 3.5 men bumped up leads the way by a pretty good margin.  That isn't a huge surprise considering they won 40 & Over 3.5 Nationals, but the section winning 18 & Over, Intermountain is only mid-pack on bump ups.  This is especially surprising considering they made the final at 40 & Over too.  New England had the lowest rate at just under 6%.

The most bump downs were in Southwest at just under 6%, and SoCal had the lowest rate at well under 3%.

More to come.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - 3.5 women bump rates by section

Continuing with my analysis of year-end ratings and bump rates, here are the bump rates for the 3.5 women by section.

As we've seen with all the by section statistics, Caribbean's bump rates set new standards and skew the chart so much I get to do one without them to see more detail for all the other sections.

Now we see that Southwest had the highest bump rates for 3.5 women at 8.9%, and the winner of 18 & Over 3.5 Nationals, Florida is right up there.  Pacific Northwest won 40 & Over Nationals but has seven teams with higher bump up rates.  The lowest is Northern at just 5.7%.  But those ranges are not terribly out of whack and aren't that big a range.  Midwest had the highest rate of bump downs at 5.3%, and interestingly Northern has another lowest rate this the bump downs at just 3.1%.  Northern had very little movement with over 91% of players staying the same level.

More to come.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - Distribution of players by level

Next in the sequence of analyzing the 2018 year-end ratings, we'll take a break of bump up/down percentages and look at how many players there are at each level.

Here are the number of players, men or women, with C ratings at each NTRP level.  I've included 2017 year-end counts as well for comparison.  The percentages on each bar are the percent of the total at that level.

This looks pretty much as you'd expect, the majority of players are at the 3.5 level, followed by 4.0, then 3.0.  It is interesting to see the counts for 2018 year-end slightly lower than 2018 though.  But analyzing declining participation in USTA League play is a topic for another day.

Here is the distribution for the women.

Similar shape, but after the 3.5 level there are more 3.0s than 4.0s, and even more 2.5s than 4.5s.

And for the men.

You can probably do the "subtraction" between the first two charts, but this clearly shows for the men, there are basically the same number of 3.5 and 4.0 men, and very close to the same number of 3.0s and 4.5s.

Stay tuned for more!

Appeal Rules for USTA NTRP Ratings

With 2018 year-end ratings now published, players that aren't happy with where they ended up may take the steps to appeal their rating on TennisLink in the hopes of having it granted.  Some may appeal up so they can play on a team with friends, others may appeal down if they don't think they can compete at the higher level or flights aren't offered in their area at the higher level.

The USTA League regulations list a number of things regarding appeals, but some of the criteria used for appeals is not public.  I wrote a blog five years ago when some of the criteria was included in a communication from the USTA, but I believe the USTA can and does make changes to the criteria, possibly as often as each year, and those rules I wrote about are now dated and no longer valid.  So if you come across that blog, don't bank on it being accurate anymore.

What we do know is what is in the regulations and here is a summary of that.  Note that for the purposes of this article, I'm only addressing the standard auto-appeals.  Manual appeals for medical or other reasons are an entirely separate thing.

First, there are some special rules for players age 60 and over.  Here is the relevant language from the regulations.

2.05E Promotion of Players 60 or Over and 65 or Over 

2.05E(1) Any player who is 60 years of age or older prior to, or during, the calendar year in which such player plays his or her first local league match and has achieved the same rating level or lower for his or her three most recent year-end ratings, without benefit of appeal of the player’s year-end rating, will automatically be granted an appeal (A rating) if promoted, subject to 2.05E(3) below. NTRP Dynamic Disqualification procedures as outlined in 2.04B(3) apply. 

2.05E(2) All players age 65 or over, if promoted, will automatically be granted an appeal (A rating) of their current rating back to their previous valid year-end rating, subject to 2.05E(3) below. NTRP Dynamic Disqualification procedures as outlined in 2.04B(3) apply. 

2.05E(3) Any player who is clearly above level under the applicable Computer Methodology procedures will be denied an appeal of his or her year-end rating under 2.05E(1) and 2.05E(2).

This basically means players over 60 that have had the same C rating for their past three ratings will be automatically granted an appeal down if they are bumped up.

Players over 65 will always be granted an appeal down, except if their rating is too far into the range for the next level.  This latter part (2.05E(3) is new for 2019 and just closes a loophole where a player that really can play at the next level (their rating is above the "clearly above level") could appeal down, now they can't.

Ok, what about the rest of us?  That is covered by a pretty generic item in the regulations.

2.05C Appeal of Year-End Ratings. Year-end NTRP valid computer rating levels may be appealed or denied through TennisLink except for 2.05D Medical Appeals.

That doesn't offer a whole lot, it just says an appeal can be done using TennisLink.

As far as eligibility to appeal, there is this:

2.07 CHAMPIONSHIP PLAYERS. 

A championship player’s computer rating achieved as a result of play in National Championships may not be appealed down following the Championship Year it is received except as in Reg. 2.05D Medical Appeals and Reg. 2.05E Promotion of Players 60 or Over and 65 or Over.

This is just saying that players that go to Nationals are not eligible to appeal down at year-end of the year they go to Nationals, except for those age 60 or over (see above).

What else do we know about eligibility to appeal?  Not much.  In the past there have been documents that mention being within 0.05 of a threshold, or graduated allowances based on the number of matches played, but I have not seen any specifics of what the current criteria are.

If you go online to appeal and it is not granted, you will see a message something like this:

Automated Appeal Decision

Automated appeal requested up for <player name> is denied - Benchmark or out of appeal range.

That simply tells you you weren't eligible or are out of range.  Don't get confused by the "benchmark" terminology, I think that is just left over from when players did get "B" ratings for going to playoffs, but that rating designation is no longer used so you should just interpret it to tell you your appeal is denied with no other special qualifiers.

Note that in all cases, a player that has an appeal granted is subject to 3-strike DQ.  This is more or less the same as a self-rated player in that if your rating gets above the strike threshold three times, you are DQ'd and promoted to the next level immediately.

Should I learn more, I'll add to this blog entry, but I'm also interested in hearing from players that appeal on whether or not the appeal is granted, so don't hesitate to leave a comment or contact me.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - Bump rates by level and gender

With the 2018 year-end ratings published, I wrote about the general and by section bump rates and also broke that out by gender and section, now to look at bump rates by level.

Here are the bump rates by level for both genders.

As is typical, there are more bump ups at lower levels and more bump downs at higher levels.

Here are how the rates look for the women.

The chart looks remarkably similar.  Let's look at the chart of the men to see if it is any different.

We see there are more bump ups for the men at the lower levels, and at 4.0 the women have more bump downs than up while the menu are still slightly more up.  No big differences though.

More to come.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - Overall and by section bump rates by gender

I just wrote about the general and by section bump rates now that 2018 year-end ratings are out, and naturally we want to begin to drill down, so here is how it is broken out by section and gender.

First, nationally, the women had 9.5% bumped up and 4.8% down, while the men had 8.3% bumped up and 4.6% bumped down.  And because Caribbean had a very high bump up rate as we saw in the prior post, removing them can show what happened elsewhere nationally and the women had 9.3% bumped up and 4.8% down, while the men had 7.8% bumped up and 4.7% down.

Now, on to the charts!

Here are the women broken out by section.

We see Caribbean again with a high bump rate and the others pretty consistent.  But removing Caribbean to see more details for the others shows the following.

The additional detail is still pretty consistent, but Mid-Atlantic and Florida both are just over 10% of women bumped up, most others around 9% except for SoCal and Hawaii with significantly lower bump up rates.  All the sections had bump down rates around 4-5%.

Here are the men broken out by section and including Caribbean.

We see Caribbean's 45+% bumped up and all the others.  Here are the others in more detail.

Hawaii and Mid-Atlantic lead the way as the only ones over 9% bumped up, the others are mostly 7-8%.  Interestingly, Hawaii had the highest percentage bumped down too at around 7%.

More to come.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - Overall and by section bump rates - Caribbean gets rocked!

2018 year-end ratings are out for USTA League players, and they were on-time or even a few hours early based on what I'd predicted.  Thanks to the USTA for getting them out this week as I know in many areas teams are forming now and knowing where players are rated for 2019 is kind of a key ingredient to forming teams.

Now, on to the analysis!

Time allowing, I'll be slicing and dicing the data every which way, but to start we'll just look at some overall and by section bump up/down statistics.

For this analysis, I'm looking at players that had 2017 year-end ratings and got a new 2018 year-end rating.

First, the overall bump rates Nationals across all levels and sections are 9.1% bumped up and 4.7% bumped down.  These are pretty consistent with most years, so nothing out of the ordinary so far.

Next, looking at bump percentages by section, we get the following chart.

We see that Caribbean has hardly any bump downs and over 45% of players bumped up!  Caribbean routinely has a large number of bump ups, but not usually this high.  Perhaps their continued success at Nationals has reaped a larger adjustment this year.  Stay tuned for more detailed analysis, but it will be interesting to see how this affects Caribbean at Nationals next year.

Update: Since I removed Caribbean below, it is also worth noting that with that section removed, the National results were 8.8% bumped up and 4.8% bumped down.

Other than Caribbean, the other sections are all pretty consistent.  Removing Caribbean so we can see a bit more detail though.

We see no section reached a bump up percentage of 10%, Mid-Atlantic was the closest, and Hawaii had the highest bump down rate and one of the lowest bump up rates.

These are pretty consistent from section to section though, so no obvious big adjustments at least at a macro level.  As I dig into gender and level within a section, I expect we'll see more variation.

2018 NTRP ratings have been published!

As I write this, it appears the year-end NTRP ratings have been published on TennisLink.  I am seeing players with ratings with a 12/31/2018 date so at least some are now available.

To check what your rating is, you can go to TennisLink and look yourself up, or login and it should show your rating.  Make sure to check the date and that it is 12/31/2018 as that is what all new ratings should show.  If it still says a different date, yours may not be updated yet, or you didn't play enough matches to get a new rating.

Stay tuned for analysis of the ratings, but if anyone has any questions or wants to get a report to understand why they were/weren't bumped up or down, contact me!  And I'm always interested in situations where players successfully appeal, so if you do that and it is granted, drop me a note.