Pacific Northwest 2018 USTA League 18 & Over Sectionals - Schedule is available

The 40 & Over Sectionals for PNW will be played in the Portland area in two weeks, August 10-12.  And for those playing or following, the flights and schedule are out.

The format is the same as before, generally two flights of four teams, each team playing three round-robin matches and the flight winners playing a final.  It is often the case that the flight winners are undefeated so four wins and Nationals here you go!  But if you lose early, don't give up hope, you could get into a 2-1 tie and win the tie-breaker.

For more information, see the 40 & Over Sectionals site.

And if any team is interested in doing some scouting to enhance your chances of winning, my flight and team reports are a great resource.  Contact me if interested.

Good luck to everyone playing!

It is the end of July, more 2018 USTA League playoffs underway, and 2019 too?

Last weekend had Southern hold their 18 & Over Sectionals, and they are back at it this weekend in Mobile again for 40 & Over.  Lets hope the weather is not as brutal this week!

But that is not the only place playoffs are going on.  Others include:

• 18 & Over Districts in Southern Cal
• 18 & Over Regionals in Maryland
• 18 & Over Districts in parts of Middle States
• 55 & Over Sectionals in New England
• 18 & Over Districts in Idaho
• A bunch of Districts in Midwest across 18 & Over, 40 & Over, and 55 & Over

But while some areas are just getting started with their 2018 playoffs, Georgia is already about to hold their 2019 early start league local playoffs next weekend!

Good luck to all playing this weekend.

Southern USTA League 18 & Over Sectionals are complete, teams headed to Nationals - Issues with ESL bumped up players yet again

Southern held their Sectionals for 18 & Over this past weekend in Mobile, and I hear it was hot and humid so a trying test of tennis for those involved.  But with the completion, we have a another Section's representatives for Nationals determined.

I've looked at how many Nationals teams have been sent by state in the past few years, so thought it would be interesting to see where this year's winners were from.

For the women:

• 2.5 - Georgia*
• 3.0 - Tennessee*
• 3.5 - Arkansas
• 4.0 - Mississippi
• 4.5 - North Carolina

And for the men:

• 3.0 - Alabama*
• 3.5 - Georgia *
• 4.0 - Kentucky
• 4.5 - North Carolina
• 5.0+ - South Carolina

Congratulations to all the teams.  And with 8 of the 9 states represented, all showed well.  Just Georgia and North Carolina had multiple winners.

You see I have an asterisk by several teams above.   This is to denote the team came from an Early Start League (ESL) meaning they played their regular season during 2017.  The reason this is interesting is that these teams may have players that were bumped up at 2017 year-end, and with the demise of Early Start Ratings, Southern has elected to allow these players to continue to play on these teams at their rostered level even though their 2017 year-end level is now a level higher.

This more or less gives these teams an advantage over their opposition that has only at-level players, and we see that at the lower levels, 2.5 and 3.0 for the women and 3.0 and 3.5 for the men, this advantage was apparent with these teams winning the sectional title.

Now, this sort of makes sense that the lower levels would benefit the most.  This is where there are the most new players that are naturally improving, and likely where the rosters are more likely to have bumped up players and have an advantage.  Once players get to the 4.0 and above levels, the improvement year to year is not typically as large and so there are likely fewer situations there are year-end bumped up players on these rosters, and even when there are they are likely not as clearly above level as at the lower levels.

The other interesting thing is that these now above level players are eligible to play at Southern Sectionals, but will not be eligible at Nationals (with one caveat).  This means the teams as constructed for Sectionals may not be the team that goes to Nationals, they will invariably be a weaker team with their best players missing.

For example, the Georgia 2.5 women's team is nearly entirely comprised of now 3.0 level players.  Given this, it isn't a big surprise they won 2.5 Sectionals and given what I said above, you'd think this team couldn't even field a team at Nationals.  They should be able to as there is a caveat in the National rule allowing 2.5 teams to have 3.0 level players on their National roster as long as a player is not "clearly above level", and it appears they have only one of these perhaps.  It appears that player is most definitely going to be a 3.5 next year and is perhaps even a borderline 4.0!  That would be something to see, play at 2.5 and 3.0 States and 3.0 Sectionals (she played on a 3.0 team too) in 2018, and get a 4.0 year-end rating a few months later.  That would be a rare progression.

But even without this player, the other 2.5 teams at Nationals are going to be facing mostly computer rated 3.0s which doesn't seem entirely fair, even if other teams likely have players that are going to be bumped up to 3.0 at 2018 year-end.

But the Tennessee 3.0 women's team does not have the clause allowing any now 3.5s to play at Nationals as 3.0s, and they have a whopping 8 of these players that won't be Nationals eligible.  That leaves just 9 players rostered that are 3.0s, and one of these doesn't appear to have gotten enough matches in to be eligible, so they have only 8 eligible players which is the minimum to send a team and is a difficult row to hoe with 4 matches in 2 days with a small roster.   But it appears there is a player who had only one regular season match that was allowed to play in local playoffs and had they not been allowed to, would not have the matches to be eligible.  Most areas require two regular season matches to be eligible so curious what happened here, as without this player they may not be able to send a team to Nationals.  This happened last year with a men's team, a Sectionals winning team that couldn't go to Nationals.

The men's 3.0 team from Alabama is also going to be impacted.  They have 7 now 3.5s that won't be playing at Nationals, but do appear to have 9 3.0s that are eligible so won't be forced to not go, but will certainly be a far weaker team with just their 3.0s and be playing 4 matches in 2 days with a small roster.

The Georgia 3.5 team won't be affected by this rule, but that is only because it is an entire roster of self-rated players and none played enough in the 2017 rating year to get a year-end rating so none of them are now a level higher.

I have to say that Southern's rule allowing these bumped up players to play doesn't seem fair to the competition they faced which is limited to having at-level players on the roster, both the other teams at Sectionals and the opponents of the Georgia 2.5 team at Nationals.

What do you think?  Do you prefer allowing teams to stay together through Sectionals even with now bumped up players?  Or should these players become ineligible soon to be more fair to the competition?

How competitive are USTA League matches? Interesting tennis league stats

USTA League tennis is level based using the NTRP (National Tennis Rating Program) system and is design to promote competitive play for recreational players.  That begs the question, how competitive is the play?

I've looked at the competitiveness of matches before in writing about playing up and its effect on scores, that analysis looking at how close scores are.  That showed that 60-80% of matches were close depending on your definition.

But another measure is a player's individual record and this is a statistic more people are familiar with and tend to track.  In an ideal world, one might expect that every player would have a winning percentage right around 50% since everyone winning and losing half their matches would indicate the matches must have been competitive.  We know in reality that isn't going to happen, and to be honest, being competitive doesn't mean you are winning and losing the same amount, as while it is fairly unlikely this would happen, you could have competitive matches (say 6-4,6-4 scores) and lose every match or win every match.

I couldn't just leave this one alone though, I had to do some analysis.  Below is a chart showing the distribution of winning percentages from 18 & Over and 40 & Over play for 2017 for players that played at least 5 matches.

We see that nearly half of the players do win between 35% and 65% of their matches.  If you extend it out to 25% to 75%, the number jump up to 70% of players.  So if your measure of competitiveness is match winning percentage, 70% of players appear to have a competitive experience.

It is interesting that the number of players in the ~40% and ~60% bands is larger than those in the ~50%.  I'm not sure a good explanation for this other than any player playing 5, 7, or 9 matches in the year cannot fall in the ~50% band, so perhaps that is it.

Note that with a fair number of players playing up, the handful of players with very poor/excellent records is perhaps not surprising.  You would expect some number of uncompetitive matches from these matches.

But even with the range for each NTRP level, when at-level higher rated players play lower rated ones, you will see lopsided results quite often and this is somewhat expected.

It is always interesting to see how the different genders fare with these sort of stats, so here are the women.

And the men.

There are slight variations, but really, no significant differences for men vs women.

What do you think?  Is the distribution of winning percentages what you would expect?  Do you think USTA League matches are generally competitive?  Or are the ranges for the NTRP levels too large?

New USTA Tennis Centers in the Pacific Northwest

I just received an e-mail from my section about a new initiative to revitalize and manage indoor and outdoor tennis centers, starting with a few facilities in Vancouver and Tacoma.

You can visit https://pnwtenniscenters.com/ to see more and learn about the Galbraith Tennis Center in Tacoma and Vancouver Tennis Center.

The Tacoma facility used to be a Bally's Fitness and had been in the news a year ago about becoming a USTA facility, but now it is official.

It appears VTC is undergoing some renovations in a month and will reopen in September.

It is always great to hear about new or renovated facilities.  Thanks to the USTA and others involved for making this happen!

How about we get a new facility in Seattle now where we are court constrained in the Winter and Spring? :)

If you win the second set, are you more likely to win the match tie-break? Interesting tennis league stats

In USTA League tennis, the majority of matches are played with a 3-set format where a match tie-break (first to 10 win by 2) is played in lieu of a full third set.

I've often wondered, and sometimes been asked, if the player/pair winning the second set has a better chance of winning the tie-break because they have the momentum, or if the player/pair winning the first rests up in the second and they come back, or if anything really can happen in a tie-break and it is a toss-up.  Well it is time to do some research and find out!

For this analysis I'm going to look at matches played in 2017 in the 18 & Over leagues and just look at the percentage of time the winner of the first/second set win the tie-break.

First, just looking at all matches played, the data tells us that 49.4 percent of first set winners win the tie-break, while 50.6 percent of second set winners do.  Statistically, this says it is a toss-up, although one might argue a slight bias towards the second set winners.

But what if we slice the data different ways?  First, by gender:

• Male - 49.1% for first set winners, 50.9% for second set winners
• Female - 49.%% vs 50.5%

So there is the same general toss-up but perhaps slight bias for the women.

Then by level:

• 2.5 - 52.9 vs 47.1
• 3.0 - 49.6 vs 50.4
• 3.5 - 49.3 vs 50.7
• 4.0 - 49.1 vs 50.9
• 4.5 - 49.3 vs 50.7
• 5.0 - 46.9 vs 53.1

Only at the extremes of 2.5 and 5.0 do we see the data stray from the general averages, and there are far fewer matches at these levels so there is a greater chance for some outlier data the skew things.  But even at these levels, there is not a dramatic advantage to either set winner, although interestingly at 2.5 the second set winner wins the match less often!

I did also look at the data by gender and level but nothing stood out, it was consistent with the above.

So it appears there is certainly not a dramatic advantage to the second set winner in a match tie-break, but perhaps an ever so slight one.  Like they say, anything can happen in a tie-break!

2018 USTA League playoffs continue - Florida and Mid-Atlantic in action this weekend, Southern Sectionals soon

It is July and that means more Districts and Sectionals are being played on the road to Nationals.

Florida has 40 & Over Sectionals taking place for the 3.5 and 4.5+ levels at the National Campus in Orlando.  This follows the 3.0 and 4.0 levels having been played last weekend also at the National Campus.  The 18 & Over Sectionals will be played in August over two weekends, the 11th-13th and then 18th-20th.

In Mid-Atlantic, Virginia 18 & Over 3.0, 4,0, and 5.0 Regionals were played last weekend July 6-8, and 2.5, 3.5, and 4.5 will be played next weekend the 20th-22nd.  Their 40 & Over will be played August 24-26.

Maryland gets going with 18 & Over 2.5, 3.5, and 4.5 this weekend, and 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0 in two weeks July 27-29.  Their 40 & Over will be August 17-19.

Sectionals in Mid-Atlantic will be August 10-12 for 18 & Over and September 14-16 for 40 & Over.

In Southern, leagues are played a bit earlier and States have all been played and 18 & Over Sectionals is next weekend July 20-23 in Mobile and 40 & Over is the following weekend also in Mobile.  So by the end of the month we'll have quite a few more teams selected for Nationals.

The new Nationals invitees will join those from NorCal, SoCal, and Southwest that have already played Sectionals.

As always, if you are headed to any playoff event and want to scout teams, my flight and team reports are great resources to assist with that, and there are already teams that have used reports to qualify for Nationals this year.

And if you've already played your last playoff matches and want to get a report estimating where your rating is and details on all your played matches, individual reports will fit the bill.

For any report, contact me for more details.