A few days ago I wrote about the use of the unflighted round-robin format being used at 18 & Over Mixed Florida Sectionals, and the particular implementation allowing for five teams to go 4-0 with only spots for four to advance. The possibility existed in both the 6.0 and 9.0 flights.
In the 9.0 flight, the possibility had disappeared after just the first day and first two matches, and by the end of the round-robin there were only two 4-0 teams still standing, along with a 3-1 team, and the rarity of a 2-2 team advancing even happened! In fact there were three 2-2 teams vying for the 4th spot, two of them were 6-6 on courts and both were from the same area (Orange/Seminole) and had both finished 4-2 in local league play, but the one that won local league (Siqueira) lost one fewer set and got the spot. All in all a competitive flight and the format worked fine.
Unfortunately it didn't work fine for the 6.0 flight. As a reminder, here is what the visualization of the round-robin schedule looked like.
You can see five teams across the top all playing the five teams across the bottom. If all the teams in one of the rows won, they'd all five be 4-0 and with only four advancing, one would be left out.
Well, it happened, and not only did it happen, it happened in pretty spectacular fashion. I'd noted in my earlier post that because it could happen, the teams would need to go all out to ensure they positioned themselves to win the standings tie-breaker and not get left out, and they all did. Here were the standings:
| Team | Wins | Losses | Ind. Wins | Ind. Losses | Sets Won | Sets Lost | Games Won | Games Lost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marion | 4 | 0 | 12 | 0 | 24 | 1 | 148 | 71 |
| Orange | 4 | 0 | 11 | 1 | 22 | 2 | 141 | 56 |
| Miami | 4 | 0 | 11 | 1 | 23 | 2 | 142 | 60 |
| Alachua | 4 | 0 | 11 | 1 | 22 | 3 | 145 | 82 |
| Broward | 4 | 0 | 11 | 1 | 23 | 4 | 141 | 61 |
No team lost more than one court across 12 courts played. No team lost more than four sets across all the matches. Every team won more than 140 games (over 11.75 per match). The "worst" of the five teams by the standings actually had the 3rd best game winning percentage with two other teams losing 10 and 21 more games respectively. So all these teams appear to have been putting their best foot forward and trying to win as easily as possible.
But in the end, a 4-0 / 11-1 / 23-4 team didn't advance to the semis! Their one court loss was in a super tie-break, and they happened to win two other courts in super tie-breaks, and losing four sets total was enough to put them behind the other teams resulting in finishing 5th.
I do not know how this went over with the Broward team, but I can't imagine it went well. Hopefully they knew it was possible so weren't surprised, but it is still tough to play that well and seemingly dominate, and then have four other teams finish ahead of you.
This was avoidable if an actual random schedule had been used. With just 10 teams, playing four matches is more than enough to decide things fairly, but the one format that would cause problems was used and it happened, similar to how it happened before.
The point of this point is not to say I told you so, but more to educate players about the pros and cons of the format to be aware of it when it is used and not be surprised, but also to be able to go to your area/district/section coordinators and ask for the best formats to be used. I'd also hope that those coordinators are learning from this experience and won't make the same mistake in the future.
To be fair, they did change the format from two years ago to take the top-4 teams to semis instead of just the top-2 to a final, but that wasn't sufficient and they should have known it wasn't sufficient and ensured this scenario couldn't happen.
My condolences go out to the Broward team, but hope once again this can be a lesson to those using the unflighted round-robin format of the importance of using it in the correct way.
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