Preface: This post is highly speculative, but is based on a little reading of the tea leaves and I think could happen, so it is worth the speculation to think about.
The NTRP system has been around for many years, far longer than I've been playing USTA League, and has gone through a variety of algorithm changes and periodic mass adjustments, but in general has worked very well for promoting competitive adult recreational competition.
But in the last few years, NTRP has been under increasing pressure from UTR, particularly with junior, collegiate, and lower level pro tournaments. This is where UTR started and is strong, and while the USTA introduced the Junior NTRP, it is different and not connected to Adult NTRP and it appears has not gained the traction UTR has, at least in this segment.
The U in UTR is "Universal" and to be truly universal one has to have results from all matches, and UTR is aiming to do that and for the past few years has been scraping USTA matches from TennisLink and including them in their calculations. This is where UTR is differentiated from NTRP, in that it calculates ratings for USTA League players plus all the juniors and collegiate players it always has, and includes ATP, WTA, and other pro tour matches, and I'm sure more. One can debate how well UTR accomplishes a single universal rating with what are almost certainly disconnected populations of players, but the USTA with NTRP doesn't even attempt to incorporate matches outside of USTA play.
Perhaps in response to UTR, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) along with other governing bodies from the United States (USTA), England (LTA), and France (FFT) launched plans for the World Tennis Number (WTN) about a year ago. I wrote my observations on the WTN after that. The original press release called for WTN to be live in late 2019 and launched in participating organization's countries in 2020, but the WTN site still says "Coming Soon ...".
Another interesting connection here is that the ITF has contracted with Club Spark to build the platform for WTN, which happens to be the same company working on what is believed to be the replacement for TennisLink (and more). What appears to be some of the "and more" is even live today at https://playtennis.usta.com.
So, if participating countries are to be adopting it soon, what about the USTA and NTRP?
With the same company that is implementing WTN also building the new TennisLink, it might seem easy for the USTA to perhaps decide to give NTRP a "make over" and just switch to using the WTN. With the WTN being on a completely different scale (40 to 1 rather than effectively 2.0 to 7.0) this would seem to be a pretty radical change and a risky thing to do with a large population of adult league and tournament players used to the NTRP system.
It is possible the USTA would phase the WTN in, either publishing in parallel or using it for various segments of play, perhaps starting with juniors, then moving on to collegiate players and lower level pro-tour events, all to be aligned with the ITF and other countries and their use of the WTN. In this scenario, it might find its way to USTA league and tournament players later, or again published in parallel to get people used to it.
This is where it gets interesting though.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated cancelation of many USTA leagues, nearly every Sectionals, and Nationals, the USTA decided to not publish year-end NTRP ratings for 2020. I understand there may have been some within the USTA that wanted to go ahead and publish, but they were overruled. In fact, rumor has it some changes have been made regarding the group responsible for NTRP ratings oversight within the USTA so changes appear to be afoot.
As part of this change, is it possible the USTA didn't want to publish 2020 year-end ratings because a switch to use WTN is coming in 2021 and it would be confusing to players to have just published year-end ratings in 2020 when rolling out a new system in 2021? By not publishing 2020 year-end ratings might we see WTN rolled out by the end of 2021 and league play in 2021 while be NTRP's swan song?
I obviously don't know the answer, only those at the USTA do and perhaps even the USTA hasn't made final decisions on if and when changes are made. But we've been waiting for a new TennisLink for years, and it just feels like it finally arriving, the launch of WTN, and the same company doing both, we could have a big bang of change coming in 2021, perhaps for 2022 league play.
What do you think? How would you receive a change to the rating system used for tournament and league play?
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