For USTA League players, the carrot that is USTA League Nationals, and the chance to go through the process to win your local league, Districts, Sectionals, and advance on to Nationals, is something that becomes a goal for a fair number of players and captains. This can promote friendly and competitive play, but taken to extremes, can result in what is considered by some to be going too far and undesirable behavior.
The NTRP level based system the USTA uses implicitly gives an advantage to teams that have players with abilities in the upper part of their level. A 3.5 team with players in the 3.40's or higher is going to beat a team with "average" 3.5s in the 3.20s and 3.30s more often than not. And generally speaking, to advance in playoffs you need to have players playing above level and on their way to being bumped up, so a Sectionals/Nationals 3.5 team will likely have at least some players in the 3.60s, 3.70s, or higher. And to win Nationals, you likely need a line-up that is all on their way to being bumped up.
Some of this can happen naturally, e.g. someone who was a legitimate 3.5 last year and got a 3.5C decides to get better and puts in the work with lessons, drills, and increased play, and they naturally get better and by year-end their dynamic rating is around 3.70 and they get bumped up at year-end. If a captain can recruit and motivate a group of players with this potential for improvement, they can be a Nationals caliber team.
But strong teams can form unnaturally too, e.g. someone that is a 4.0C from 2 years ago took it "easy" or perhaps deliberately lost last year to get bumped down to 3.5C and joins with a few others that did the same to have a 3.5 super team that can be Nationals caliber. While natural bump downs can happen, when they are manipulated like I noted, most agree this violates the spirit of the rules for sure, and perhaps even some specific rules.
Another way super teams form at times is with brand new players that are able to self-rate at the desired level. The USTA has self-rate guidelines that dictate the minimum level for a player based on their playing history, but they are far from perfect and can't factor in everything that might identify how good of a player someone is, and there are routinely situations where someone with "4.0" ability is able to self-rate as a 3.5 and if several of these get together, or are sprinkled in with players described above, they can also form a Nationals caliber team.
Self-rating "too low" as allowed by the guidelines is not a violation of any written rule, but some would argue that a captain/player probably knows they are out of level, or will figure that out after a few matches, and should opt to only play up going forward once they figure it out. But not everyone feels that way and there are pressures from teammates to not bail on them, this is their chance at Nationals after all.
Now, the USTA will say the three-strike DQ process is in place to catch these players, but in my opinion, the threshold are too high and the minimum matches too low and that allows players to hide and make it to Sectionals and Nationals when they really are clearly out of level.
With the advent of WTN, I think there is an opportunity for the USTA to do something to address the self-rate issue. Many players that self-rate will have played in high school or juniors, and if WTN does what it is purported to, these players will have a WTN rating. I would posit that an actual rating based on match results should trump, or at least play a factor in the self-rate guidelines such that a player with a WTN of N or better can self-rate no lower than 4.0 for example.
I would think this would help tighten up the self-rate process and avoid some of the blatant under self-rating that goes on, and get players at the right level sooner.
Now, for this to work, WTN needs to work and be equitable across all players and there are some early indications there may be some challenges there (womens singles, womens doubles, mens singles, mens doubles), but hopefully that will improve, and even as-is I think using WTN in the self-rating process could help.
Note, UTR has been around and arguably could have been used in self-rating for years now, but the USTA was never going to validate UTR by doing so. They have WTN now, so make it happen!
What do you think? Should a player's WTN play a factor in what they can self-rate at?
Another aspect are the players that deliberately self rate in order to fit into a desired competitive band. WTN moves the cheese of these players because WTN is much harder to obscure your identity and then go back and self rate.
ReplyDeleteIt's the ugly truth about USTA when it comes to winning. Improving is good, but only to an extent. If you get too good, then you're bottom of the next level and often irrelevant. The USTA could/should monitor things much better, but mostly turns a blind eye and ignores most of these things at least with getting everyone rated as accurately as possible, particularly when it comes to obvious sandbagging and absurd under self-rating. If one district/section polices these things appropriately, great. But, that only hurts that district/section in the end if the whole country isn't onboard.
ReplyDeleteNot sure how WTN is going to improve anything. If a player plays HS, and then tries to join USTA 5 years later with only sparingly playing in non-real matches during that timespan, what does that tell us, for example? WTN seems to be only making things more complicated giving 2 separate ratings/player. Plus, as you showed in your prior analysis, WTN seems very inaccurate. Under no circumstance would a 3.5 lady be anywhere close to a 5.0 guy, and that's what's happening with WTN some. I see way more inaccuracies with WTN early on than with NTRP. The ranges within each NTRP level relative to WTN is too drastic. UTR has huge ranges, too. They say a 4.5 guy would be anywhere from 7-9, which is a huge difference, but could extend from 6-10 even, so that's not great either.
You are right about the conundrum of level based play. I've said before that the USTA should move the thresholds every year so the "top" of a level changes and who is the best can rotate around.
DeleteWTN can help if the player is joining a league team within a year or two of competitive play. I'm guessing it isn't quite as all over the place for juniors as it is for adults.
What do you mean by moving thresholds? For example, if 4.50 is the top of the 4.5 division one year, make it 4.45 the next year as the top? But, then that division would be changed to 4.45. Or just bump the top 5-10% at 4.5(or any division into the next higher division) into the 5.0 division naturally while still saying it's the 4.5 division.
DeleteI'm guessing you probably mean the latter here and while that does seem like a good idea, I still see some problems with that. If the USTA is artificially changing levels/ratings of players, that doesn't seem very accurate. How often will they do this? If it's every year or every 2-3 years, the 4.5 division will just become the 4.0 division, etc. It's not as big of a deal with 2.5s becoming 3.0s, 3.0s becoming 3.5s probably for examples, but if more 4.5s are pushed into the 5.0 range, a lot of those players won't have anything to play. Granted, maybe some of them should be 5.0s so my previous sentence would be irrelevant, but I feel like 5.0 is a very extreme level, and the USTA bumping too many players into that range. I know of at least one current starting Big 10 player who has a 5.0 rating, which seems quite low, but maybe it's accurate.
You're probably right about WTN and juniors. But even if we can accept WTN for juniors, that's not consistent with everyone involved if we can't accept WTN for adults if we're talking about USTA leagues. WTN/UTR accept mixed doubles results while NTRP usually doesn't unless someone only plays mixed. I don't know, maybe NTRP should include mixed doubles regardless, but I'm not so sure about that. If the USTA eventually moves to WTN, they must be changing their minds how they calculate ratings.
Think of it more as redefining the levels to be letters, A thru whatever, and this year, a C player is someone 4.01 to 4.50, e.g. today's 4.5. But next year a C player is 3.91 to 4.40.
DeleteI think it could work locally. You have, say, 160 men sign up for a league and maybe you put that into four divisions with top 40, next 40 and so on and then divide into teams within that. local tournaments I have been in (where the organizers know most of the people) have an a and b division and the dividing line is really to make sure there are like 8 people In Each division. Hard to do this when you get to district or regional tournaments.
ReplyDeleteYep, in some ways the _problem_ with the USTA is Sectionals and Nationals where the issue of ratings needing to be equitable rears its ugly head. But that is also the perk of USTA League for some players.
DeleteBut what do you do after locally, if anything? And each local place across the country would be a different standard for each division?
DeleteThere's a lot to be desired with the NTRP system, but it probably gets it right around 80-90% of the time, since each level is so big. It's almost always going to be a lot less accurate in smaller populated areas and if players only play the bare minimum number of matches necessary to obtain an actual rating(3-4). The 2 biggest problems is sandbagging and self-rating. The USTA has done a very poor job of managing these 2 things. Whatever rating system they choose will not fix these problems, depending on how they use WTN. WTN could help with more accurate self-rating possibly in some situations, but not necessarily, and not all.