The USTA sends out more e-mails introducing the ITF World Tennis Number

I haven't written about the World Tennis Number (WTN) in just two days, but over that period I've received three more e-mails from the USTA introducing or announcing it.  They clearly want to get the word out, and I guess their tactic is working as they are getting me to write about it again! 😮

The first new e-mail (yesterday) highlighted that your WTN will show up on your usta.com profile.  Note, this is different than TennisLink and what you see when you login to your account there.  My guess is TennisLink remains as it is today and WTNs only show up on usta.com.

As a reminder (see this post for more details), a WTN is in the range from 40 to 1, with 40 being a very beginner and 1 being top pros.  It appears what will be shown on a player's profile is a WTN to one decimal point, e.g. 28.2, but they are also going to show a "Game zONe" range that gives an indication of what WTNs you will be competitive against.  An example they give shows that 28.2 player having a Game zONe from 25.2 to 31.2, and the USTA posits that if you play against someone within this range, you would be expected to win 35-65% of the time.

This e-mail also directly addresses the state of NTRP and explicitly says "[NTRP] is NOT planned to go away as it is a key tool designed specifically for your USTA League experience".  This makes it sound like leagues will continue to use NTRP for awhile at least.

Tournaments may be a different story, particularly for juniors, but even for Adults you might see WTN used for selection or seeding incrementally over time.

The first of today's e-mails (Thursday) highlights how WTN is more than just a single number but will provide access to various statistics and head to head metrics at worldtennisnumber.com.  That site says there are just over 1.2M players with WTNs.

The second of today's e-mails is pitching the webinars that are going to be held the next few weeks, which is the same as the e-mail from Tuesday.  The description for the webinar starts "As an integral part of our USTA Junior Pathway", which reinforces that it is really just about juniors to start.

Other information in or linked in the e-mails just regurgitates earlier information I already wrote about.

Since the USTA is pushing it so much, it is probably worthwhile to speculate about what this might mean to a League player.

First, I expect that leagues will continue to use NTRP for the foreseeable future.  There is a chance that some alternate leagues could experiment with using WTN in some way, but there will be a number of challenges with that:

• WTN is far more granular than NTRP and you can't really have flights on a single WTN but would need ranges.
• WTN will be calculating different ratings for singles and doubles so a player could be a 23.4 in singles but a 25.6 in doubles, so what flight/range is the player eligible for?
• WTNs will be updated weekly, so what happens when a player becomes out of level?

There are probably other subtle issues beyond these, and they can probably be overcome, but a switch to WTN will take a lot of time and trials and experiments.

Second, while League won't specificly use WTN, player's WTNs will be published and available and could be used in a few ways.

For juniors or collegiate players, there will be an opportunity to use their WTN and map it to NTRP in lieu of self-rating as it is done today.  This should be a significant improvement as the self-rate questionnaire, as well intentioned as it may be, isn't perfect and it can place players at the wrong level.  Using an objectively calculated rating should be much better.

Published WTNs will also be available to captains to use to recruit players, scout opponents, and otherwise plan line-ups.  It is also possible that the USTA could mandate that line-ups must be done with higher WTNs on court 1 or 2.

Third, many players do crave more information about where they stand and if they are improving.  NTRP only being published yearly and only to the 0.5 level clearly doesn't address this, and as a result players use third party sites or get reports from me to fill this hole.  With WTN, they will see what this new rating says which will at least give players a measure of if they are improving or not.

However, it is a different algorithm than NTRP and it is entirely possible a player's WTN improves but their NTRP goes the other way, and obviously WTN will not give an indication of if a player is going to be bumped or not, so perhaps there will still be demand for my reports.

I will now anxiously await the next USTA WTN e-mail to see what additional info they share.  Will I get on Friday?  If not, I may have to wait for a webinar next week and will write more then.