Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - 4.5 men bump rates by section

Continuing with my analysis of year-end ratings and bump rates, here are the bump rates for the 4.5 men by section.

Caribbean again leads, at just over 45% at this level which is surprising given that as the levels goes higher the trend typically switches from more bumps up to more bumps down.  So we again do the chart without Caribbean.

Here we see the largest percentage bump goes to Hawaii 4.5s being bumped down at over 13%.  They still had over 3% of their 4.5s bumped up though.  Middle States, Midwest, and New England also had a lot of bump downs, so look for them to perhaps have strong 4.0 teams next year.

The largest percentage of 4.5s bumped up goes to SoCal, and almost more up than down.  Mid-Atlantic, Missouri Valley, and NorCal were close behind.

More to come.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - 4.5 women bump rates by section

Continuing with my analysis of year-end ratings and bump rates, here are the bump rates for the 4.5 women by section.

Caribbean again leads, and is back over 40% at this level which is surprising given that as the levels goes higher the trend typically switches from more bumps up to more bumps down.  So we again do the chart without Caribbean.

We see as we get to the 4.5 level, every section (not named Caribbean) had more bumps down than up.  The closest to break even was Florida and Pacific Northwest was fairly close too.  Hawaii, Southwest, and Midwest were all very lopsided towards bumps down.

It is interesting though that Midwest made the 18 & Over final and still gets this many bumps down.  PNW won 40 & over so can understand their position, but Southern did well in both events and still has nearly twice as many bumps down than up.

More to come.

USTA Adult League Participation 2013 thru 2018 - The decline in unique players continues

USTA League Nationals are done for 2018 and year-end ratings have been published, and I've been analyzing bump up/down rates in a variety of ways and that will continue, but lets take a break to do a related analysis and look at participation numbers for the past year compared to prior years.

For this analysis, I'm looking at unique players that played a match in the Adult leagues which includes 18 & Over, 40 & Over, 55 & Over and 65 & Over during each ratings year, which is roughly November thru October.

This does not include any participants in Mixed, Combo, Tri-Level or other secondary leagues.  Including those may change the trends and I'll try to look at those as well.

I've been doing this analysis for a few years and so I'm just adding 2018 to prior years so we can see the trend.  So here goes!

What we see above is that while there are still more than 250 thousand unique players in Adult leagues, the trend from 2013 continues and there is a decline overall and amongst the men and women.  Overall, participation was down 3.9%, and the women's and men's decline was each also 3.9%.  This is unfortunately the largest drop for any one year period over the past five years.

Now, while nationally there is a drop, that doesn't mean participation is declining in all areas or in all leagues.  This is looking at just the main Adult leagues and in past years, 40 & Over and 55 & Over have been growing with 18 & Over shrinking.  Here is what that now looks like adding in 2018.

First, here is participation in just 18 & Over.

This is still the largest division with over 190 thousand participants, but we see significant decline here of 4.2% overall, 4% for the women, and 4.4% for the men.

Here is 40 & Over.

This tells a different story with growth from 2013 thru 2017, but for 2018 that is gone and there was an ever so slight decline.

Here is 55 & Over.

Here we see steady growth but a flattening in 2018.  Overall, women, and men all grew, but the men were up 10 players, and the women only a few hundred.

The working hypothesis I've floated in previous years is that the USTA membership is aging and that fueled the growth in 40 & Over and 55 & Over, as more players became eligible, but those players have begun to play less 18 & Over and they are not being replaced by new under 40 players.  This seems to still be the case, and now even 40 & Over has shown a very small decline which would seem to indicate players that have played in the past are choosing not to now.

Again, as I noted above this is looking at just a slice of USTA League play.  I will look at the other leagues soon to see if there are pockets of growth there.  A notable one is the new 18-39 league as that is hopefully an area we will see growth and will pull in younger players.

Also, some areas have shown growth in recent years, while others are declining faster than the national averages above.  I'll look at that too.

What are your thoughts on the decline?  Is it real in your area?  What are ways to turn it around?

Stay tuned for more.

Note: These are statistics from the data I've gathered and may not exactly match the USTA's data or they may report numbers using different criteria than I am.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - 4.0 women bump rates by section

Continuing with my analysis of year-end ratings and bump rates, here are the bump rates for the 4.0 women by section.

Caribbean again leads, but at just under 30% this is significantly lower than the other levels/genders I've posted so far.  So we again do the chart without Caribbean.

The thing that stands out here is that nearly every section had more bump downs than up, over three times more in one case in Texas.  Several others are close to even, but the predominant trend is that more 4.0s were bumped down than up.

With Texas having more than 7.5% bumped down, perhaps look for them to be strong at 3.5 Nationals next year.  Southern had nearly 7.5% bumped down too which is surprising considering they made the semis in 18 & Over and the final in 40 & Over, but it is a very large section so can certainly have different trends by state.  But Midwest also won 18 & Over and they have a pretty high bump down rate too.  Eastern did win a Nationals and has the highest bump up rate.

More to come.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - 4.0 men bump rates by section

Continuing with my analysis of year-end ratings and bump rates, here are the bump rates for the 4.0 men by section.

Once again, Caribbean dominates the chart so below is the chart without them.

Now we can more clearly see the variation and that Hawaii had an abnormally large number of bump downs this year at over 9%, but still had more than 6% bumped up.  The largest percentage of bump ups was interestingly in Northern at nearly 7.5%.  Given that they didn't make the semis in either 18& Over or 40 & Over that is a surprise.

Caribbean did make the final in both events winning one so I'm sure that contributed to their high rate, but Southern and Florida were the other finalists and Florida did have a high bump up rate but Southern not as much as some others.

More to come.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - 3.5 men bump rates by section

Continuing with my analysis of year-end ratings and bump rates, here are the bump rates for the 3.5 men by section.

As we've seen with all the by section statistics, Caribbean's bump rates set new standards and at nearly 40% of 3.5 men being bumped up skew the chart so much I get to do one without them to see more detail for all the other sections.

Here we see that Mid-Atlantic at nearly 12% of 3.5 men bumped up leads the way by a pretty good margin.  That isn't a huge surprise considering they won 40 & Over 3.5 Nationals, but the section winning 18 & Over, Intermountain is only mid-pack on bump ups.  This is especially surprising considering they made the final at 40 & Over too.  New England had the lowest rate at just under 6%.

The most bump downs were in Southwest at just under 6%, and SoCal had the lowest rate at well under 3%.

More to come.

Analyzing 2018 USTA NTRP year-end ratings - 3.5 women bump rates by section

Continuing with my analysis of year-end ratings and bump rates, here are the bump rates for the 3.5 women by section.

As we've seen with all the by section statistics, Caribbean's bump rates set new standards and skew the chart so much I get to do one without them to see more detail for all the other sections.

Now we see that Southwest had the highest bump rates for 3.5 women at 8.9%, and the winner of 18 & Over 3.5 Nationals, Florida is right up there.  Pacific Northwest won 40 & Over Nationals but has seven teams with higher bump up rates.  The lowest is Northern at just 5.7%.  But those ranges are not terribly out of whack and aren't that big a range.  Midwest had the highest rate of bump downs at 5.3%, and interestingly Northern has another lowest rate this the bump downs at just 3.1%.  Northern had very little movement with over 91% of players staying the same level.

More to come.