PNW USTA League Regulations Changes for 2019/2020 - Thanks Adam!

I just received a PNW USTA newsletter highlighting a few USTA League regulations changes for 2020, and one for 2019.  These can be found here.

Most of them are minor clarifications where something wasn't clearly stated or staff had received a lot of questions, and go into effect for the 2020 USTA League season.

But one goes into effect for 2019 and is near and dear to my heart.  That is the tie-breakers used for breaking standings ties.

I've written much about it so won't go into detail again, but how standings ties are broken according to the National regulations is frankly flawed in my opinion, and I went so far as to make a regulations change proposal to National to get it fixed.  Alas, it wasn't adopted for the 2020 regulations, but I'm pleased to see that Adam Hutchinson, PNW Director of Competition that I worked with to sponsor my proposal, recognized the issue and has made a change for 2019 to fix it for the One Doubles league run in the PNW section.

Specifically, One Doubles is a league where each "team" match is a single doubles match, which means the team record is the same as the individual wins/losses record making that component of the standings tie-breaker meaningless.  In situations like this, the flawed components of the National tie-breaker come into play a lot more often and there had been numerous situations where the less deserving team had advanced.

Adam had observed this, it is part of why he supported my proposal, and decided he could do something about it in PNW and did.  Here is the write-up of the change, but the summary is that instead of using the inequitable sets and games lost components in the absence of looking at sets and games won, sets won and games won will be used.

For example, consider two teams exactly equal on all counts except for one match against a common opponent.  Who should get 2nd place?   Team A lost their match 6-0,6-0, while team B lost their match 6-7,7-6,1-0.  You would think that the team that got blown out is less deserving, but under the National regulation, team A, the one not winning a game, would advance having lost the same number of sets (2) and having lost fewer games (12 vs 14)!  With Adam's change, team B would advance first as they won a set in their loss (1 vs 0), but also clearly won more games (13 vs 0) if it came to that.

This, IMHO, is clearly fairer and will avoid the occasional situation where the "wrong" team advances.

Thanks Adam!