To that end, today's update is that a tournament to be played in Austin this weekend has had its draws published on TennisLink! Here is the link to the tournament on TennisLink so if you are looking for draws you will find them there. The Play Tennis site has several links (more below), but the main one is here and while you can navigate and see the players in the tournament, the draws section of the site appears to be empty.
Why did this happen? I'm not sure. I saw a Junior tournament from New Years weekend using the new site and this tournament in Austin seems to be the only one on TennisLink for 2021, so it must have been something specific to this tournament. But I'm guessing it was an issue with the Mixed Doubles events as that is where things look strange on the new site.
The new site link I gave above is to an event named "Level 5 Open - 2021 CATA Polar Bear Adult Doubles", which is the same as the name on TennisLink, and the events listed include various Men's and Women's ages/levels as well as some for Mixed. The new site lists just Open Mixed and Husband/Wife Mixed while TennisLink. also lists NTRP Mixed for levels 3.0 thru 4.5.
However, on the new site, there are also four tournaments named "Unsanctioned - x.y NTRP Mixed Doubles CATA Polar Bear" for levels 3.0 thru 4.5, so I'm guessing the new site had issues including these in the main tournament and they had to be split off, but then players playing in both were having to register for two, or more, different tournaments and draws would have to show up in separate places, and perhaps other challenges, and they just decided it wasn't working and needed to use TennisLink.
I'm glad they (apparently) got it all working so they can hold the tournament, but it is a bummer TennisLink had to be used. There are always growing pains with a new site/system so for now we'll chalk this up to that and hope the USTA doesn't have to fall back to using TennisLink again. But if you are looking for this tournament in Austin, that is where it is!
I'm not liking the new tournament site overall. It's harder to search in some ways, but easier in other ways. So, not all bad. And the USTA does seem to be improving it, so will give it time. Hopefully every section will be adding more tourneys soon. Not as many in winter than summer, but I bet TDs aren't adding as many adult tourneys now as they normally would, and focusing on junior tourneys if anything now until they're more comfortable navigating through the new site.
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting how you found that tourney on tennislink. If you click on 2021 tourneys on tennislink, it takes you to the new site. I tried finding this Polar Bear tourney on my own to see if I could, and had to backtrack from a saved link I still have of 2020 tourneys.
Yep, I had to do a search and not find it, then do a Modify Search to get the advanced search screen where I could put parameters in to find it.
DeleteAgree the new site is getting better, it was worse a month or two ago, but it still isn't there yet.
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