An early look at 2021 USTA NTRP year-end rating appeals - women appeal up and down, men appeal down

2021 year-end ratings have been published for 11 days now, and I've done some analysis already, but I thought I'd take a look at how many players have successfully appealed.

Note of course, there very well may be more players that appeal and have it granted in the future.  As hard as it may be to believe, not everyone lives and dies by their year-end rating and some players may not think about appealing until they start signing up for leagues in the new year.

But a lot of players do try their appeals right away, so at this point, I think we can get a good idea of the general trends.

First, at a high level, for players that received a 2021 year-end C rating, there have been 3,546 successful appeals 2,186, or 62% of them down and 1,360, or 38% up.  So more appeals down than up, but not quite a 2 to 1 ratio.

Next, breaking it out by gender, the women account for 2,166, or 61% of the appeals and 47% were down and 53% were up.  This is quite balanced and pretty close to 50/50.

For the men, they were just 39% of the appeals and a whopping 84% were down and just 16% up.  Clearly the men are biased towards appealing down.

But the level matters too, as it is more understandable that lower rated players may have a desire to appeal up while higher level players want to appeal down, sometimes just to have more playing opportunity.

For the women, here is how it breaks out for each year-end C rating and how many appealed either way:

• 2.5 - 337 up
• 3.0 - 66 down, 476 up
• 3.5 - 206 down, 294 up
• 4.0 - 342 down, 35 up
• 4.5 - 281 down
• 5.0 - 118 down
• 5.5 - 11 down

We do see that as the year-end level goes up it swaps from players appealing up to appealing down.

For the men, here is how it breaks out:

• 2.5 - 16 up
• 3.0 - 12 down, 85 up
• 3.5 - 197 down, 80 up
• 4.0 - 433 down, 34 up
• 4.5 - 377 down, 3 up
• 5.0 - 138 down
• 5.5 - 5 down

We see more appeals up at 3.0, but unlike the women the swap to more down happens at 3.5.  And the men have far fewer appealing at all at 2.5 and 3.0.

It appears men are more likely to appeal down than women are, but this is in large part because men tend to have more players appeal at the middle/higher levels than the women, and it is more likely that higher level players are going to appeal down than up.

What do you think?