Important PNW Seattle USTA League Dates

For those that play USTA League in the Seattle area of the Pacific Northwest, here are some of the important dates to be aware of.

As I just wrote about, the 18 & over league started a couple weeks ago and is going full bore already.  The regular season for the weekend flights is scheduled to run from 1/8 to 4/10 while the weekday flights run from 3/21 to 6/3.  Local playoffs for all teams will be 6/9-6/12.

The 40 & over league gets started a bit later, it runs from 2/19 to 5/22 and does not have separate weekend and weekday flight schedules.  Local playoffs for 40+ will be 6/3-6/5.

Sectionals for both 18+ and 40+ in PNW will again be held in Spokane this year.  18+ happens first from 8/12-8/14 and 40+ two weeks later on 8/26-8/28.

2016 USTA Leagues have started in the PNW/Seattle, some teams with 4 matches already!

In the Seattle area, January means the start of the 18 & over Adult league with the weekend flights all beginning play as early as the 8th.  The weekday flights start a bit later.

Usually each team will play 8-9 matches in their regular season and do this over the course of 3 months or so meaning a few weeks off.  But this year, some teams have already played 4 matches through just 3 weekends, and some are going to be all done with their regular season by the first weekend in March!  With local playoffs not being held until June, that is going to be quite a layoff.

What this means is it is never too early to start getting Estimated Dynamic NTRP Rating Reports.  Whether you want to see what your own rating is doing, get a team report for your own team or another to scout them, or get a flight report to see where all the teams stack up in a flight, contact me to request one or for more information.

Seattle area 2016 USTA League 18 & over play starts this weekend

It is just the second weekend of 2016 and USTA League play in the 18 & over division starts tonight in the Northwest Washington district (Seattle area) of the Pacific Northwest section.

The start of the year is always exciting as new teams have been formed and many have high aspirations so that first match is a good gauge of where the team stands.  A win gets a team off to a great start, but a loss is not the end of the world.  I can attest to being on a team that lost our first match but still made local playoffs.

A number of local teams have gotten preview reports for their sub-flights to see how all the teams stack up.  These reports now include several things.

First is a table showing the average Estimated Dynamic NTRP Rating for the entire roster as well as the average by level should there be players playing up or the flight be a plus flight.  This lets you see how the teams compare top to bottom.

Second is a table showing the average for just the top-8 rated players on the team.  This shows the strength of the theoretical best line-ups if they were to be used, which gives an indication of who might be stronger in important matches when the teams play their best players.

With this information, teams can make better decisions about which matches are important and they need their best players for versus those that have a weaker opponent and some of the lower rated players can play in without jeopardizing a team win.

And last year, one of the flight reports I did locally did predict Harbor Square to win the 18+ 3.5 men locally and they did, and in fact went all the way to Nationals.  So sometimes these flight reports pan out in predicting who will win.

Contact me if interested in any reports.

Happy New Year! It is time for 2016 USTA League Tennis

Happy New Year!  To all those that read this blog regularly, thanks!  And to those that may have just come across it, welcome.

It is now officially 2016, so 2016 leagues can begin.  Wait!  In some areas 2016 leagues began way back in May of 2015 (hello Georgia), so it isn't really the start of the league year.  But in many areas, mine being one, the main 18 & over and/or 40 & over leagues do get started in January and February.

As a reminder, all advancing leagues are part of a specific championship year, but they may start and play their local league matches as part of an early start league in the prior year.  In my area for example, our 18+ Mixed and 55+ leagues are early start leagues, so those regular season and local playoffs for 2016 are already complete.

Even if your league doesn't start for a few months, teams are still forming and preparing now, and captains with their sights on making playoffs are recruiting and seeing if they can get the strongest players at their level.  If you need help recruiting with a targeted list of players/ratings or team reports, let me know.

Happy New Year, and have fun on the courts!

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?