Hallelujah, 2020 is over! Here is hoping for a much better 2021.
2021 will hopefully mean that USTA tennis gets back to normal, or at least something more like normal. Some sections are planning to play a normal USTA League schedule, but some areas like mine (PNW) and NorCal and SoCal are postponing the start of play a couple months due to continued state imposed restrictions.
Delays in starting league play does not mean leagues will be canceled again. I know PNW is willing to be creative to adjust schedules to find a way to get seasons in and be able to advance teams to Sectionals to determine who will go to Nationals. But like happened last year, at some point too many delays may result in Nationals being canceled. My guess is that if a few sections are unable to send teams, Nationals will go on, but at some point too many sections are missing and they are called off. I'd also expect sections to focus on getting the 18 & Over league in as that has the largest number of players and teams, perhaps at the expense of 40 & Over or 55 & Over. I hope it doesn't come to that, but that course of action would make sense if it does. I did some analysis of when matches are generally played to get an idea of when things start to become dire.
With the cancellations of leagues and tournaments last year, there is likely some pent up demand for players to find events to play in, and that presents an opportunity for the USTA to offer events to meet that demand. Players that typically only play USTA League may even be interested in playing USTA Tournaments as a way to get on the court in a competitive environment more.
The good news is the USTA has launched a new site for finding tournaments. The challenge is it has had some growing pains and tournaments have been slow to on-board. Since it is now 2021, it makes sense to take a look at how the site is doing.
First, the on-boarding has continued with more tournaments now on the site. When I checked just over 3 weeks ago, there were 773 tournaments, with 105 of those for adults and the rest predominantly Junior tournaments. As of the writing of this blog, there are now 1,658, so the total has more than doubled. For the adults, the total is now up to 226, also more than double.
However, more than half of these Adult tournaments are in just two states, Florida and Texas. After their combined 114, only Georgia (16), Arkansas (13), Alabama (10), and New Mexico (10) even have double digit Adult tournaments on the Serve Tennis site now.
I'm sure a big part of this is tournaments in those states with COVID-19 restrictions not putting their tournaments on the site yet. But there are a lot of states across the south without restrictions and many of those seem to not be on-boarding their tournaments yet. Whether this means they aren't going too hold the tournament, or are just slow to add them to the site, I'm not sure, but I'd hope to see more Adult tournaments listed by now.
What about the distribution of Junior tournaments? There is more balance, Georgia and Florida both have over 100, and another 10 states all have more than 50 tournaments, so it just appears the focus of the new site has been juniors and not adults so far.
Second, the new Tournaments site had some changes, perhaps in response to some of what I wrote, but more likely feedback from players trying to use it. Notably, you can select a category, enter a location, and specify a date period before searching now, whereas it used to be just a location was provided. Just the location is required, the other fields default to all categories and it appears the current month. I think this change helps, but I'd probably default the date range to at least the next two if not three months as just the current month is pretty short.
After the initial search, the other attributes can be used to filter the results similar to before. One of those attributes is distance from the location searched on, and previously this had odd gradations of something like 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, or unlimited. I commented this wasn't terribly useful and suggested 10, 50, 100, 500, and unlimited as the options that made sense. Well, either someone is reading my blog or I just had a premonition as the options are now 10, 25, 50, 100, and unlimited. Not exactly what I proposed but close. I'd still contend something between 100 and unlimited is needed, as someone may be willing to travel a couple hours for a tournament, and right now there is a big gap between <100 and unlimited.
I'd also commented that sorting on date didn't work, and tada, it now works!
Something that is oddly missing is the ability to search by tournament name. This would seem to be a common way to search as you may know or heard someone talking about the name of the tournament, but so far, this way of searching is not available.
When you find a tournament and navigate to its page, there is now a place to see the players that have entered, which I know many players like to look at, so that is another good step in the right direction.
So Serve Tennis is getting there. In a way perhaps, COVID restriction in some areas may allow it to get through its growing pains before the number of tournaments grows significantly.
What do you think? Will you be playing USTA tournaments any time soon? What are your thoughts on the new site?
