When standings/seeding comes down to a coin flip in USTA League - Another case of insufficient tie-breakers

The 40 & Over Mixed season has just completed its regular season in my area and teams are now advancing to local playoffs.  Our local playoffs have the top-2 teams from each sub-flight advance into a single elimination bracket so seeding is important as it determines where the teams go in the bracket and who plays who.

The seeding is done using the standard USTA regulations and what TennisLink uses for standings, that is:

• Team won/loss record
• Individual court record
• Head-to-head
• Sets lost
• Games lost
• The dreaded coin flip

When you are doing seeding and breaking ties between teams from different sub-flights, head-to-head won't come into play, so it is pretty common that the sets lost and even games lost tie-breakers come into play.  And every once in awhile, it comes down to the coin flip.

That every once in awhile appears to have happened for one flight this year as there are two teams from different sub-flights tied with a record of 4-2, each with an 11-7 court record, each with 18 sets lost, and each with 171 games lost.  Let's bring on the coin flip to decide things!

Now, the good news is this is just for seeding, it is not determining which team will advance and which won't.  But while rare, a tie certainly could occur in the same sub-flight where a coin flip would decide which team advances and which doesn't.

Could this coin flip be avoided?  Absolutely!  I've written about the shortcomings of the current standings tie-breakers for awhile and even went through the process last year to submit a rules change proposal to fix it, but alas the proposal was not adopted and we are stuck with the current flawed tie-breakers.  Well, to be fair, the PNW section has adopted a local section rule in one case to fix one of the more egregious scenarios, but the problem remains in all the others.

Here is what should have happened.  The criteria used before sets lost should have been sets won/lost differential.  By this measure, team A was +5 (23-18) and team B was also +5 (23-18), so this is a push.  Next, rather than going to the horribly flawed games lost tie-breaker, it should have been games won/lost differential where team A was +15 (186-171) while team B was was -4 (167-171).  Certainly team A should get the higher seeding as by an objective metric (where they are clearly better, it isn't even close), and not a random coin toss!

Now, it is possible that team A wins the coin toss and this is all moot.  Or it is possible team B wins the coin toss and both teams lose first round and it is all moot.  And this is only for seeding so isn't really that big a deal right?  But if the rules could easily be altered to doing the seeding more fairly and equitably, why not do it?

What do you think?