I
wrote earlier this week about unbroken ties occurring for the 40 & Over leagues where the 4-court format has been adopted. This is an update with more information I've learned and an updated count of unbroken ties occurring.
And I should actually correct myself, the ties are being broken, but the tie-breaker used is not documented as the ones that are documented are not sufficient. This is the issue, that players and captains don't know what the tie-breaking criteria is and are left to enter the scores and see what TennisLink says with no explanation of why.
First, I have now found
16 matches that were not decided after applying the documented tie-breakers. No, 16 isn't that many, but we are also barely a month into 2020 and quite a few 40 & Over leagues have not started play yet. And 16 is more than the none some people and USTA staff said there would be when presented with the issue of the tie-breakers being insufficient.
Second, in my
earlier post, I tried to deduce what the undocumented tie-breakers actually were, and arrived at it being some combination of season game winning percentage (GWP) and/or the visiting or home team.
Regarding GWP, the regulations say it is supposed to be used, but it is supposed to be the GWP
from the match and not the GWP for the season. Yet apparently, to date, it is the season GWP that is being used.
Using season GWP doesn't really make sense IMHO, as it puts the team who has had a harder schedule to-date at a disadvantage when playing a team who has played an easier schedule. The first team will likely have a lower GWP than the second team simply due to the order of playing the matches, and should it end in a tie, the second team gets the win due to having the easier schedule. It is "something" to decide a winner, but it less equitable than a coin flip. Yet it is what I've learned TennisLink has been doing so far this year.
Note of course, using GWP as the rules call for is a meaningless tie-breaker. The prior tie-breaker is games lost. and in a head to head match, if both teams are tied on this and lost the same number of games, that means they won the same number of games and the GWP for each will be 50%. So in the context of a head-to-head match,
GWP is a meaningless tie-breaker.
Now, I think the USTA may have gotten enough complaints about the ambiguity of this that they may be trying to fix it, meaning fix TennisLink to calculate it correctly. It is unclear how quickly this will get done.
The issue now is, what does that mean? Will the USTA go back and
retroactively correct match winners using the corrected tie-breaker? Or will those results stand even though the
winner shown is incorrect per the rules? Clearly, it should be fixed retroactively to be fair and equitable, but I don't know that will happen. And if it isn't corrected soon enough, teams will finish their season and be declared flight winners and move on to playoffs, and then the toothpaste is out of the tube.
Of course, since we established that GWP as the tie-breaker after games lost is meaningless for a head-to-head match, what will break the tie when teams are still tied when it decides nothing?
As I wrote earlier, it appears the win has been awarded to the visiting team when no other tie-breakers can break the tie. On one hand this makes sense as the visiting team managed to tie the match despite being at a disadvantage of having a "road" match. However, in some areas, the home/away designation is arbitrary as teams don't play out of a "home" club, and matches are simply played at a facility that the League Coordinator has secured. So now the
winner really is decided by effectively the flip of a coin since whomever the visiting team is is arbitrary.
This is all caused by the
questionable move to a 4-court format for 40 & Over, which is seeming to be more and more short-sighted the more we learn about it and experience it. Thankfully some sections found a way to make a
bad decision more palatable by using a
Points Per Position format for standings which avoids the unbroken 2-2 tie problem, but it still has its own pros and cons and certainly changes the dynamic of how a captain assembles a team and plans their line-ups.
But the sections still using team wins for standings are stuck with all of this confusion and inequitable selecting of match winners. Why couldn't the USTA have just stuck with 5-courts?!
What is also frustrating for players is all of the issues now cropping up and causing confusion are things I
wrote about in early October when the new regulations first came out. I also sent my observations and identification of issues to the USTA in early October (
4 months ago!) asking them to clarify things and fix the TennisLink problem that still exists today. Perhaps my raising the issue caused at least one section to switch to Points Per Position to avoid the problems, but it is unfortunate for the rest of the players that nothing has been done to officially address the issues or clarify the tie-breaking rules.
What is worse is that some players have elected not to play 40 & Over because of the change to 4-courts and chances of all these issues coming to fruition, which they clearly have. In one area that had been showing 5-8% growth in participants in 40 & Over the past three years,
participation is down over 2%. Read
this for more details. I will be checking other areas, but if this is observed in other sections, what was a growing division in past years may become a shrinking one.
If you are in an area that is using the 4-court format and team wins for standings, I encourage you to ask your League Coordinator what the tie-breakers are and ask that they be documented. If fiascos like this keep on happening, any decrease in participation there may be this year won't be a one year blip and that would be sad.
