Local playoffs for the 40 & Over league in Seattle are going on this weekend, and I went to TennisLink to see how some friends had done in the matches. Let's ignore for now that TennisLink is terrible as trying to follow along with local playoffs like this as there is no central place to see the schedule or get to draws, you more or less have to find a player or team and then find their championships and navigate to the draw where you can see only that draw. Want to see other draws or NTRP levels? Prepare to search and navigate a bunch more. But I said I'd ignore that for now, so moving on.
I found the draw I was after but no score had been recorded yet. But my wife got a text from a spectator saying our friend's team won and I refreshed the draw and indeed I saw the match was now recorded ... except the draw said the other team won!
Confused, I clicked on the match, and court by court our friend's team had won 3 courts to 1, but going back to the draw, it showed the other team winning 3-1.
Thinking this was perhaps a TennisLink web-site issue, I went to the iPhone app but it too showed a draw with the other team winning and advancing.
Clearly something is amiss with TennisLink, perhaps the issues in the new Serve Tennis/Play Tennis site have found their way into TennisLink, and it turns out our League Coordinator knows, as she is using a Google Docs spreadsheet to keep track of playoffs and pointing folks to it! And it is even linked to from the Northwest Washington page on USTA.com.
Kudos to Jill for recognizing the issue and coming up with a solution, but it is sad she has to do that. She is effectively having to do double work to enter results in the spreadsheet and eventually go get them in TennisLink.
But going back to it being hard to follow events like this, it is doubly bad when TennisLink is messing up as I don't think it is well known that a Google Docs spreadsheet is being used so fans don't know to look there and may look at TennisLink and get incorrect information it appears.
So, if you are trying to follow playoffs this weekend, don't head to TennisLink, but instead go here and click on the 2021 A40 Playoffs sheet where you can see a much nicer than TennisLink schedule for the whole event in one place and all the results.
