2015 USTA League team winning scenario percentages - Interesting tennis league stats

A question was asked on Talk Tennis about how often a team wins a match by winning the three doubles courts while losing the two singles courts.  I calculated the answer to that (5.9%), but that naturally caused me to look at all the other scenarios a team could win a match with.

For this analysis, I looked at all 2015 championship year 18 & over and 40 & over matches that were a 2 singles and 3 doubles.

To start, there are three scores a team can win a 2 singles / 3 doubles match with: 5-0, 4-1, and 3-2.   There is only one way to win 5-0, five ways to win 4-1, and ten ways to win 3-2.

Here is a chart showing the percentage each one occurred along with what would be expected based on the number of permutations for each score.

Somewhat surprisingly, teams winning 5-0 occurs a lot more often than expected.  I've done double checking of the data and I am not including defaults or retirements, so I think it is accurate.  Even 4-1 occurs more often than expected while a 3-2 score occurs most often, but less than expected.

But what about each specific winning scenario?  There are 16 of these, and the chart below shows how often each one occurs.

The x-axis is showing the courts won in the order singles 1 and 2, then doubles 1 thru 3, e.g. 11110 is winning all courts but 3rd court doubles.

Since there are 16 potential results, if each one was equally likely, you'd expect each to be at 6.25%, but we see winning all the courts is again a lot higher, and the 5 4-1 scenarios are all over, and then all of the 3-2 scenarios are under.

I'm not sure exactly what this tells us other than close 3-2 matches are less common than you'd expect.

What do you think?  Is this consistent with what you see in your league?

2013 - 2015 USTA League participation by year, division/league, and gender, USTA League players are aging - Interesting tennis league stats

I took a look at how participation in USTA League has changed the past three years, specifically looking at the number of unique players playing in all of the advancing 18 & over, 40 & over, 55 & over, and 65 & over divisions/leagues.  The natural next step was to look at the numbers for each division, so here goes.

First, here is the 18 & over division.

The trend here is similar to the overall trend, the drop here being just over 3% since 2013.

Here is the 40 & over division.

Interestingly, while the totals for this division are lower than the 18 & over as you might expect, the unique players in this league has grown each year!  Participation is up nearly 7% since 2013.

An explanation for this might be that as some of the 38 and 39 year olds have turned 40, they've elected to only play 40 & over and there have not been enough new under 40 year-olds joining to fill the void.  And those that turn 55 seem to continue to play 40 & over.  Also, the 40 & over division was new for 2013 so perhaps it took some a year or two to get on board with it.

Let us see if the trend continues in 55 & over.

Sure enough, the trend continues.  This group is up over 4% since 2013.  As the 53 and 54 year olds have turned 55, they keep playing at a higher rate than they get too old or injured and stop it would appear.

Given all this, it would be interesting to see what the average age of these players is.  Alas, I don't have that data, but I would hypothesize that the average age is increasing which would indicate that existing players keep playing as long as they can, but the new younger players are not joining and playing USTA League enough to replace the older players that do end up not playing at some point.

What do you think?

2013 - 2015 USTA League participation by year and gender - Interesting tennis league stats

I see comments periodically saying that participation in USTA League has been declining the past few years.  Naturally, that gave me reason to take a look.

Using the data I have from calculating Estimated Dynamic NTRP Rating Reports, I took a look at how many players have played in the 18 & over, 40 & over, 55 & over, and 65 & over Adult divisions regular season.  These number do not include players that only played Mixed, or only played in Tri-Level, Combo, Singles, or other non-advancing leagues/divisions.

First, kudos to the USTA for organizing leagues that get nearly 300K players participating.  I'm sure this is a small fraction of all the tennis players playing in the United States, but is still a good sized number.

But to answer the question about participation, there does appear to be a small but consistent decline the past few years.  It may be hard to see in the chart, but total participation was down about 4,000 from 2013 to 2014, and was down another 2,000 this year.  So just over 2% from 2013 to 2015.

And the decline is pretty consistent across genders, although men's participation almost stayed flat from 2014 to 2015.

With all data and analysis, we need to understand what we are looking at and this is looking just at participation in the advancing leagues as noted above.  It could very well be that while these have declined, the other non-advancing leagues haven't and could even have grown.

As to why there might be a decline, I can only speculate.  There could just be fewer people playing tennis, or perhaps league fees have gone up and driven a few away, or some have decided they don't want/need to play in the advancing leagues and taken their play to other leagues/divisions.

What do you think?

Christmas Estimated Dynamic NTRP Rating Reports are back! The perfect last minute gift for the tennis nut

Once again, I am generating special PDF versions of Estimated Dynamic NTRP Rating Reports, perfect as a stocking stuffer or last minute gift for that hard to buy for USTA playing tennis friend or family member.  The PDF of the report will be provided at no extra charge and you'll still get my explanation of the report in the e-mail I send with the PDF.

Here is what the PDF will look like.

Contact me to request a report or with any questions.  And Happy Holidays!

Tracking the activity of your dog doing agility - FitBark dog activity monitor

I recently wrote about tracking my own activity when playing tennis using a Misfit Flash activity monitor.  But what precipitated it all was getting an activity monitor for our dog and that piquing my interest in tracking my own activity.

My wife and I have a very energetic Cocker Spaniel, and realized pretty early on that we needed to find something for him to do.  My wife ended up getting into agility with him, first for fun, but now competing in agility trials, and they are both doing great.

A natural question we had was how active our dog really was.  We came across an ad for pet activity monitors, and after doing some research purchased a FitBark Dog Activity Monitor.

The small bone shaped device attaches to your dog's collar and monitors his activity just like an activity monitor you would wear does.  What makes it really useful and interesting is the app you install on your smart phone that "fetches" the data from the device and displays it for you.

The data that is retrieved is turned into points, and a daily point goal is set based on the dog's breed, age, gender, weight, etc. (but it can be overridden).  In the image above, the details for the day are displayed and then a summary of the daily totals for the week.  The green line is the daily goal, which you can see the our dog is exceeding his daily goal on a regular basis and on this day was over 50% over it.

But it isn't just the total for the day, but the hourly view you get in the chart and the break-down of how much time was spent resting, active, and playing.  The hourly view is great as we can see exactly how much activity he gets when we go for a walk or go to the park to chase the ball, or in our case how many points he gets from a run through an agility course.

The app has other features to track a "pack" of dogs, compare your dog's activity with other dogs of the same or similar breeds/sizes, share the information with friends, family, or your vet, and even link it with your own activity monitor should you go running or biking with your dog.  The app has even been updated several times in the couple of months we've been using it so they continue to enhance and improve it.

And the FitBark even collects data when you aren't home, so you can see exactly how active your dog is when no one is home.  There is even a WiFi station you can get that fetches the data while you aren't there and uploads it to the cloud so you can run the app and see the up to the minute activity and points.

We have been very pleased with the FitBark and would highly recommend it to any agility dog owner, or any dog or pet owner, as it provides new insights into the activity and health of your pet.

Do you have a FitBark or other activity monitor for your dog?  I'd love to hear your comments.

Tracking your activity when playing tennis - My experience with a Misfit Flash

This post is going to deviate a bit from discussing NTRP ratings and USTA League stats, but is still about data related to tennis.

Personal activity monitors, e.g. Fitbit, Garmin Vivo, Nike Fuel, etc. have become very popular recently.  I succumbed and got one, a Misfit Flash, in part because I'd gotten a FitBark activity monitor for my dog (see more here) and also being a data junkie, getting data about my activity is a bit intriguing.

I have not used many other activity monitors, and this is not intended to be a full review of the Flash, but it is a fairly inexpensive device does provide the basics of monitoring your steps, calories, and miles.  It also accumulates points for you and measures your progress towards a daily goal.

The points it calculates are based on a variety of factors, one being the type of activity you are doing.  You are able to track a specific activity and identify what the activity type is.  You also tell it where you are wearing the device (wrist, shoe, waist), and when you do this, it calculates your points accordingly.  For example, the same activity it monitors for a period will result in more points if you tell it you were running vs walking.

But what I really care about is what it says about playing tennis, and thankfully, there is a specific activity type for tennis.  So I mark the start and end of when I play, tell it the activity was tennis, and voila, it tells me how many points I accumulated for the activity.

The image above shows the total for a day in which I played twice for a total of about 3 hours.  There was about 1.5 hours of singles and 1.5 hours of doubles.

The image to the left shows the specific activity when I played singles on this day and you see I garnered a bunch of the points from it.

I do notice that I get more points from singles than doubles.  I probably get about 900 points per hour from doubles and 1,200-1,400 per hour from singles which all makes sense.

All in all, I'm very pleased with my Misfit Flash.  I'm sure other trackers do more and have more features, and the Flash has some quirks, for example there is no display, just a dial with LED's and a single button.  But you can monitor your daily progress, start/stop an activity, and see the time with something as simple as this.

If you use an activity tracker when playing tennis, leave a comment and let me know what your experience has been.

2015 USTA League bump percentages by level, 5.0 men and women - Interesting tennis league stats

This post continues the thread of analyzing the 2015 USTA League year-end bumps up and down.  I've already looked at bump up/down percentages by section and overall, as well as for the 3.0 men and women, 3.5 women and men, 4.0 men and women, and 4.5 women and men.  Now I take a look at the 5.0 men and women.

Here are the men.

It is no surprise there aren't many bump ups, but the number of bump downs is a bit surprising, particularly in Hawaii and New England where about half and one third were bumped down!  And a bunch of other sections had more than 15% of 5.0s bumped down.

Here are the women.

The women are similar, but Caribbean and Northern have nearly every 5.0 bumped down, but there are also very small numbers here with hardly any 5.0s in the first place.

So it seems there is definitely going to be a bunch of strong 4.5s in 2016 with all of the 5.0 bump downs.