The primary USTA League Adult Sectionals are complete in the PNW and someone brought to my attention a player that was disqualified at the 40 & Over Sectionals this past weekend.
The player in question was a 3.5S and played on the men's 3.5 team that made it to and won the final, and the player played in all four of the team's matches going 4-0 without dropping a set and giving up a total of 13 games across the four matches, the equivalent of about 6-2,6-1 each match.
Going in to Sectionals, the player was 12-0 including going 6-0 playing up at 4.0 and not dropping a set in any of those matches. Interestingly he had dropped four sets earlier in the year playing 3.5 but managed to win all four match tie-breaks.
Now, most people know you don't get DQ'd based on your win/loss record, it matters who you play (and play with in doubles) and it is entirely possible to go undefeated and not get strikes if you happen to play weak opponents or have really close scores. But on the surface, this player was well above level and the DQ very well may have been justified and perhaps was even overdue. But that isn't what I'm writing about.
Instead, the topic is how PNW allows out of level players to play through the completion of Sectionals and only be DQ'd and promoted after the event, letting all results stand. Since the scenario happened this weekend, I wanted to walk through the implications of it and how it affected the other teams and who qualified for the final and advanced to Nationals.
I've written about this before, one time when the rule in PNW changed for 2022, and then it came up again earlier this year when National went the other way and will administer DQ's during Nationals starting in 2027.
So, back to what happened at Sectionals. The player very well could have had one, maybe even two strikes going in to the event, and almost certainly had at least two of his matches at Sectionals recorded as strikes, but perhaps all four is possible. But let's go through some scenarios.
Conservatively, he got this third in the final at Sectionals and if strikes were checked during Sectionals, he would have been DQ'd and his match reversed, and because this was a 2-2 win for his team, this would have become a loss and instead of going to Nationals, the opponent would be going instead. That is a pretty big shift.
But let's consider if he would have gotten his third during the round-robin play. If it were in the last match, then all three of his wins would have been reversed, and the 2-2 tie would be a 3-1 loss, and the two 3-1 wins would have become 2-2 losses, and instead of going 3-0 the team would have gone 0-3 and a different team would have advanced to the final and had a chance to go to Nationals.
If the third strike would have been from the second round-robin match, then the first two would have been reversed, but the team could have played a different player in the third, so they could have possibly gone 1-2, but still another team would have gone to the final.
Had the third strike been from the first match, then there is a chance they go 2-1 and still make the final, but that would have been really hard considering they would have replaced him with a significantly lower rated player and would have had a 6-0,6-0 loss contributing to the standings tie-breakers.
So, was this fair to the other teams? In virtually no scenario does his team advance to Nationals if strikes were administered during the event. And now that he is DQ'd, his the team going to Nationals is effectively not the same team as they are weaker without him, and arguably the section is not sending the strongest team possible.
Now, one of the arguments for only administering the strikes/DQ after the event is that players have paid money to travel and take time off and you don't want to ruin the trip for them after just one match. Well, what about all the other team's players who also traveled and took time off and were forced to play an out of level player, or have their team take a team loss because of playing an out of level player, and lose their opportunity to go to Nationals because of it? Should the priority be to be fair to those 40-50 players instead of worrying about the one out of level player getting to keep playing?
It seems clear that National has had a change of heart and feels it is better and more fair to all the opponents to administer strikes during the event, and Nationals is almost certainly a bigger investment from a travel and time standpoint. So if National feels that way, shouldn't Sections follow suit?
What does your section do regarding this rule in playoffs, and what is your view on it? Should strikes be administered during championships with results reversed? Or should it only happen after the event letting matches played stand?
