2016 USTA League NTRP rating bump percentages, overall and by section - Interesting tennis league stats

It has been a couple days since the 2016 USTA year-end NTRP rating levels were published, so as the dust settles it is time to start doing some analysis to see what we can learn.

This is the first in what is sure to be a series of posts looking at how many players were bumped up or down, slicing the data by section, level, and more.  For the purposes of this analysis, I'm looking at the changes for players that were 2015 and 2016 year-end computer rated.

First, overall, 87% of players stayed at the same level, with 4% bumped down and 9% bumped up.  Keep this in mind as we take a look at the data by section.

By comparison, last year at 2015 year-end, 8% were bumped up and 4.7% bumped down.  So not a radical change at all, a similar ratio of bump ups to downs, and similar numbers overall.

And here is the overall data by section.

The chart shows things were actually quite consistent from section to section.  There is the usual large number of bump ups in Caribbean, but nearly every other section is in the range of 7-10%.  Southern Cal, which did well at Nationals, is the highest after Caribbean, and then Texas and Pacific Northwest.  Southern is somewhat surprisingly fifth after being my Section of the Year, but with so many players in the section it would be hard to bump the entire section up!

Bump down were also quite consistent, being right around 4-5% in nearly every section.

The above includes both genders together.  What about if we look at them individually?

Here is the chart by section for women.

This is actually quite consistent with the overall stats.  Pacific Northwest is now second behind Caribbean, but you still have Southern Cal, Texas, Southern, and Southwest close behind.  Being a strong section traditionally, Northern Cal had a surprisingly large number of bump downs, the highest percentage of any section!

And here is the chart by section for the men.

As you might imagine, the men aren't wildly different.  Southern Cal actually beats out Caribbean for the highest bump percentage, and Hawaii leads the way for bump downs.

If you look at the same charts from 2015, there appears to be a lot less variation, the sections are a lot more consistent.  It appears the USTA did not see the need to make any mass adjustments, at the section level at least, which is a bit surprising given how a few sections continued to dominate at Nationals.

What do you think?  Were are the bump percentages what you expected?

If you are interested in knowing more about your specific rating, I'm still doing reports for 2016.