An initial look at the effect of 4-court format for 40 & Over in 2020 USTA Leagues

New 2020 leagues for USTA play are starting right away in some areas.  Where these leagues are in the 40 & Over division, it provides an opportunity to look at the impact or result of moving to a 4-court format.

In the Pacific Northwest, several districts start their 40 & Over leagues right away in January, so I thought I'd take a look at some team and player statistics to see if anything jumps out.

One hypothesis is that with the move from 8 to 7 players per match, and just one singles court per match, rosters may be slightly smaller, but it may also result in a few extra teams being created as the surplus players get together to create new teams.

Note that with play starting right away, the number of teams is set, but players may continue to sign-up as the season progresses so the player counts may go up.

Here are some statistics for the Seattle area 40 & Over division for the past few years.  All years prior to 2020 were the standard 5-court format with 2S/3D and for 2020 it is 4-courts with 1S/3D.

Champ Year	Teams	Total Rostered	Unique Rostered
2016	207	3,369	3,071
2017	230 (+11%)	3,661 (+8.7%)	3,301 (+7.5%)
2018	247 (+7.4%)	3,948 (+7.8%)	3,502 (+6.1%)
2019	257 (+4.1%)	4,131 (+4.6%)	3,697 (+5.6%)
2020	277 (+7.8%)	3,674 (-11%)	3,340 (-9.7%)

The first thing to note is that this division has been growing year on year for awhile now.  So it is a little tricky to say if continued growth is just from that trend continuing or an effect of the new format.  But I'll make some observations.

First, the growth rate of teams had been going up, but has taken a jump up for 2020.  This would seem to support the hypothesis above, that a few new teams were formed that might not have been with the 5-court format because smaller rosters are needed.

Second, the rostered players has also been growing, but a slight slowing of the growth rate.  As of right now, there is a dramatic drop in the rostered players, but like I noted above that is likely due to some players procrastinating signing up and the roster counts will go up.

But roster sizes have been between 15.9 and 16.2 from 2016 thru 2019, and right now they are just 13.2.  Every team would have to add about 3 players to get back to what has been normal.  That could happen, I will have to check in on this stat mid-season.  But if registration were to go up he same as teams, we'd expect the total rostered to get up to 4,450.  Anything short of that would support the hypothesis that roster sizes have gotten smaller as a result of the format change.

Third, the unique rostered just gives an idea how many unique players there are vs total registrations.  So several hundred players are playing up each season to play on multiple teams.

Too soon to make any conclusions, but stay tuned for more.

Do you play in an area that is starting 40 & Over shortly and do you have a format change?  If so,  let me know and I'll take a look at the stats.