The USTA held a Virtual Town Hall Meeting earlier this week which was a combination league update and information session on the NTRP. The NTRP part was something of a repeat of a recurring session given on-site and in webinars over the past few years, I attended one held in Seattle three years ago and wrote a summary and this one reinforced much of what was said there, but had a few new items of information.
You can watch an hour long replay here, but here is a summary of the key takeaways I had.
There were a number of presenters including what appears to be some new leadership including Michael Hughes from National and Heather Hawkes who has run prior NTRP sessions. John Niedfeldt-Thomas who chairs the Adult Leagues committee also spoke.
A few league updates were given at the start:
- The new team types (closed, closed but seeking, open) I wrote about in January were highlighted.
- The refer a friend program is now open to all. Refer a new or lapsed member to join/renew and you could earn a $25 gift card through the end of this year (while supplies last).
Then it was on to the NTRP info session.
An oft asked question is about how the system deals with tanking. The response was there is no way to no for sure which matches are tanked so they are not thrown out or otherwise identified right now. They continue to look at it but have no mathematical definition and are worried about throwing out good matches.
Another popular question is about publishing ratings more frequently. The response is that since the NTRP was created for league play which is seasonal and played at different times of the year in different areas, but culminates in Nationals in the Fall, publishing more often would disrupt team play and there is no way to do it that would work across all sections.
For years, NTRP tournaments have not been treated consistently, many sections didn't include them in NTRP calculations, but it appears nearly all sections are or will be including them in year-end ratings soon, the hold-outs are for technical reasons.
A common complaint is that the difference in ability between the top and bottom of an NTRP level range is too large, and the matches are not competitive. The discussion here introduces the distinction between "competitive" and "compatible", the USTA saying that two players of the same level should be "compatible" but not necessarily every match will be "competitive".
Why not shrink the bands to make it so more matches are competitive? The answer is that while that is possible in some more highly populated areas, doing so across the board would be difficult in smaller or more rural areas as there aren't enough players for critical mass at narrower levels, or in larger areas there are not enough courts to support the additional teams that might result from an increase in flights and teams.
A very popular question is why there isn't more transparency and publishing of dynamic ratings. The USTA response is that they feel there is an over-emphasis on the rating, leading to ratings management and degradation in the league program and they are concerned that publishing ratings would make this worse. It isn't a hard no however, they are always looking at ways to engage the player with more information.
Side note, obviously their lack of transparency when it comes to dynamic ratings gives me an opportunity to do reports for folks wanting to get an idea of where their dynamic rating may be, and more importantly see how their rating is changing and what is and isn't working well. It also leads to the variety of other sites that publish ratings, that the USTA continues to say are not authorized and are wildly different from the actual rating the USTA calculates. I believe it was said that the most used site is out-of-level for players 40-60% of the time, which is even worse than what I've observed when I've done some casual sampling and comparisons.
What about calculating separate ratings for singles and doubles? The response was it would be a huge change and I think would wreak havoc with team formation when a player had different levels for the different disciplines.
What about UTR? The USTA sees that UTR serves a different segment of the tennis playing community, juniors and collegiate players, but claims it falls apart when applied to other segments. That is consistent with what I've heard and observed as league player's UTRs can be all over the place and change wildly.
A question was asked about using UTR as part of the self-rate criteria. This is actually not a bad idea, but the response was it is not consistent enough to use reliably.
What about the World Tennis Number (WTN)? I've written about WTN before, and the USTA doesn't see it as a competitor to NTRP, although it was said it is designed with all segments in mind and the USTA has been participating in its development along with the majority of federations who have agreed to share data. How the USTA may use WTN is TBD.
Will matches played in 2020 count for ratings? We know 2020 year-end ratings were not published, which has caused a number of problems, but if you played matches in that year, they will be counted for what is effectively a 2020/2021 rating period when ratings are published at year-end.
Since there were no 2020 year-end ratings, what about players that should have been bumped up or down? The USTA did institute a perhaps one-year only appeal process where players can manually appeal and if the data from 2020 matches supports their request, it may be granted. I wrote about this here.
Self-rating, and abuse of the process, is always a concern and a question was asked about going back to in person ratings clinics. The response was that those clinics were more subjective than the current process and was abused in its own way, and the new process is more cost effective and efficient.
Last, a question was asked about if the USTA adjusts things to keep the distribution of players at each level at some desired percentage. The answer was no, but that the ratings naturally fit a bell curve nearly perfectly and a manual review or adjustment to maintain this is not required.
Hopefully this summary is useful for you if you aren't able to watch the webinar replay. What do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment