For those of you used to going to TennisLink for rating or other USTA League related information, that is not where you will go to see your WTN. Instead, go to usta.com and login to your account there, and then select "Profile" from the menu in the upper right, and it should show you your WTN. This link may take you there if you are already logged in.
What is surprising is given all the hype the USTA has been whipping up about WTN with all the recent e-mails and webinars, WTN's started showing up with no announcement. Perhaps it is just rolling out now and an announcement will show up in the next day or two.
Note, as I've written about, you will have both a singles and doubles WTN unlike NTRP where you have just one rating/level that incorporates all play. The "singles" and "doubles" on the WTN widget on your profile are clickable to switch between seeing the two ratings.
In my case, I play primarily doubles and have a WTN close to where I'd expect given my analysis on a hypothetical mapping between NTRP and WTN. My NTRP is a 4.5C and my WTN is 21.0 for doubles. What is surprising is that my singles WTN is 12.6! While I like to play singles, at this point, I am almost certainly a better doubles player and clearly my WTN does not reflect this. This may be an indication of some issues with the WTN algorithm.
What is also interesting is my doubles WTN does not have the Game zONe but my singles does, despite no singles matches in league play recently.
What NTRP are you and what is your singles and doubles WTN? Do your WTN ratings make sense? Or does something seem amiss?
Wtn has many more factors and pay attention to the confidence level. Higher confidence reflects more recent play.
ReplyDeleteKevin-you do good work, but positing there could be an "algorithm issue" based on a sample size of one is a little silly.
DeleteFair point, but I did not say there "is" but said "may". I don't see an issue looking at something that is grossly out of whack and wondering if there is an issue.
DeleteBut I will certainly look at other scenarios and report on them before I make any stronger statements.
My only point is that a sample size of one is a sample size of one. I realize you said "may" and not "is"! :) I look forward to a larger scale analysis from you!
DeleteI agree with Kevin and think there is definitely an algorithm issue or maybe calculations are not yet complete. I looked up the WTN (doubles only) for the members of my women's 3.5 team. One of our top players who is expected to move to 4.0 has a WTN of 23.7 while a 3.0 member who is playing up has a better WTN of 21.8. Overall, our team ranges 17.5 to 29.4 - an enormous spread with NTRP equivalent of high 2.5 to mid 4.5 for a team of 10. This appears to be more useless data which will inevitably do nothing but further fuel the ridiculousness in league play. Thanks, USTA. :(
ReplyDeleteAfter nearly six months of seeing how WTN works it's pretty clear that a player's initial rating number has a significant and persistent effect on the player's rating. The algorithm appears to keep the rating near that initial point, which makes the ratings highly resistant to change, even if the player keeps beating much better ranked opponents. Different starting points and resistance to change likely explains the big disparity in ratings between players of similar skill.
ReplyDeleteRight. The initial starting number for everyone is huge. WTN has yet to fix that problem. It's been out for a year now. Will WTN start having yearly ratings calculated like NTRP and adjust everyone's numbers appropriately? I wonder how they came up with everyone's starting number, too.
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