USTA League Captain's Corner and new team types available to recruit players

I received USTA League Survey e-mail this morning, and in answering it I was reminded that the USTA added a team type in TennisLink recently and I hadn't written about it.

What is a team type?  It is a feature in TennisLink intended to help captains fill their roster.  Specifically, a team can be marked as one of three types:

• Closed - This is essentially the status quo and how teams have operated in the past, where a captain gets a team number and shares it with those players they want to sign-up, and the player uses it in signing up on TennisLink.
• Closed but Seeking - This provides captains a way to receive an e-mail when a player seeking a team signs up with the USTA and the captain can elect to contact them if desired, giving them the team number to sign-up.
• Open - This allows players to find a team and sign-up directly without needing the team number.

In my area, our League Coordinator has done a great job of effectively offering "Closed but Seeking" by having a list of players looking for a team she regularly sends out to captains, but the "Open" type is brand new and so may be useful in some situations.

In my experience, in PNW at least, I've observed that many teams are a carry over in some way from a prior year and are made up of players who have played together and often are formed in advance by the captain.  These teams will stay "Closed" and operate as they do now I expect.

But there are some teams that may be short on players and need depth, or need a singles player, and for these the other two teams types may be useful.  I would think a captain would need to be pretty desperate to use the "Open" type, but perhaps there are some scenarios where it will be useful so it nice to have it as an option.

I should add that an introduction and link to the PDF above is on a page entitled Captain's Corner where other information for captains appears and perhaps this will be a hub for this type of information going forward.

What do you think?  Will these new team types help captains fill rosters and new players find teams?