2019 Southern 18 & Over USTA League Sectionals Recap

The Southern section held their 18 & Over Sectionals this weekend, actually the last finals finishing up today, and here is a recap.

First, the weather.  The event was again in Mobile, and again there was rain.  So much that by the end they were playing no-ad and short sets to 4 rather than 6.  Note that 40 & Over is back at Mobile against this weekend and the forecast is for a 50% chance of scattered thunderstorms Saturday thru Monday, so there could be format changes again.  Let's hope the rain isn't too bad and a Sectionals Champ isn't decided with a short format.

Second, this Sectionals used the flightless random round-robin format for some events, it appears where there were fewer than 10 teams and so they couldn't have two five team flights.  Thankfully, unlike NorCal's use of the format where they had as many as 21 teams in the round-robin and each team play only 3 matches, Southern had each team play 4 round-robin matches and with only 7-9 teams in the round-robin, there were no undefeated teams left out from advancing to the semis.

That isn't to say things were always clear-cut.  There were some ties for the advancing spots:

• The 2.5 women had seven teams in the round-robin and three teams tied at 2-2 for 3rd-5th, but the 3rd and 4th teams had better court records.
• The 4.0 women had nine teams in the round-robin and a 4-way tie for 4th at 2-2, but one team had a better court record and advance, but still very close.  One super tie-break goes the other way in a number of matches and the result is a lot different.
• The 4.5 women had eight teams but no tie for the last advancing spot.
• The 3.0 men had eight teams and a 3-way tie for 4th, the advancing team having the better court record.
• The 5.0+ men had seven teams and a 2-way tie for 4th, the advancing team having the better court record.

So the format seemed to work well, and thankfully things were decided on court records and didn't get to the bad tie-breakers.

Third, we need to check if any Sectional Champs were early start league teams with bumped up players that won't be eligible at Nationals.

• The 3.0 men had a Georgia and Alabama team in the final, both from ESLs with players that are now 3.5s, and Georgia won.  They have just one 3.5 though so the team will largely be the same at Nationals.
• The 4.5 women had an ESL Georgia team in the final, but they did not have any year-end 5.0s and lost to Kentucky in the final anyway.
• The 4.0 women had an ESL Tennessee team in the final with one year-end 4.5, but Louisiana won the final.
• The 3.0 women had an ESL Georgia team with 7(!) now 3.5s playing a Tennessee ESL team with 3 now 3.5s.  Georgia predictably won and now goes to Nationals with a radically different roster than they won Sectionals with.  The seven ineligible players played in 66% of the player slots in round-robin.
• The 2.5 women had an ESL Tennessee team with 6 of 10 eligible players now 3.0s win and advance to Nationals.  Note that these 3.0s may be eligible for Nationals as the 2.5 level is granted an exception and players must be "clearly above level" to not be eligible for Nationals.

So one team will definitely be affected, and two others may have minor impacts to their Nationals eligible rosters.

Were you at the event?  How did it go or what are your thoughts?

ITF announces new World Tennis Number to compete with UTR

Regular readers of my blog may remember me writing about the International Tennis Federation's (ITF) International Tennis Number (ITN) in the past.  Well, it appears the ITN will be no more and be replaced by a new World Tennis Number (WTN).

The announcement, made jointly with several national tennis federations including the USTA, FFT (France), and LTA (Britain), doesn't offer many specifics but states that the WTN will

aim to break down one of sport’s key barriers to participation - uneven match-ups - allowing players of all abilities to determine their individual level. This will help players identify opponents and competitions of an appropriate standard and access to more competitive and enjoyable playing opportunities.

It goes on to mention that the WTN (emphasis mine)

will be a powerful enabler in fulfilling the fundamental objectives of increasing participation, and recruiting and retaining players of any age, gender and ability.

I don't believe the prior ITN specifically said whether it was or wasn't gender neutral, but clearly the WTN is intended to be gender neutral, unlike the USTA's NTRP but like UTR.

Some other items of note that I gleaned from reading the site and FAQ:

• Targets players of all levels, but a focus on recreational players.
• Reaffirms being gender and age neutral.
• Separate WTN for singles and doubles.
• No mention of calculation details other than it being "based on the player’s performance in matches relative to the strength of their opponent".  It does say the principals of the calculation will be published for all to see, but it is unclear to what level of detail that will be.
• Late 2019 to early 2020 launch.
• Mentions an on-line community to connect players worldwide.
• Other countries participating in the development include Canada, China, Ireland, Netherlands and Switzerland.

It also discusses adoption of WTN and says national association's existing rating systems are unaffected by introducing the WTN, and the roll out of WTN within a nation is up to the association and it may or may not be adopted along side or as a replacement for the existing system.

To me, while there is no mention of UTR in the press release or site to my knowledge, this is a shot across the bow of UTR.  The ITF is the international governing body for tennis and sees providing a way for players from or within any country to find and play competitive matches to be within their domain.  And to be fair, they created the ITN years ago pre-dating UTR.  Whether it is "international" or "universal" or "world" or "galactic" doesn't really matter, the aim is the same.

But ITN was not widely used (at least from my perspective in the U.S.) and frankly was dated in its algorithm and methodology as they were aiming to make it easy to implement by national associations or organizations 10-15 years ago or more.  In many ways, this sounds like an update to ITN to get it current, and they decided to rebrand it at the same time to make a splash.

What does this mean to USTA League and Tournament players?  My guess is nothing in the short term, I can't imagine there would be a change to use WTN in any way in the next few years.  But the USTA is supporting the WTN so I imagine there will be some collaboration to either support the calculation of the WTN by the ITF, or perhaps even calculate a WTN for players from their USTA play.  Regardless of how the USTA runs leagues and tournaments going forward, it appears players will have a WTN to use and gauge their play by.

What do you think?  Is WTN late to the game?  Or will a rating supported by the ITF and major national governing bodies carry more weight in the end?

PNW USTA League Regulations Changes for 2019/2020 - Thanks Adam!

I just received a PNW USTA newsletter highlighting a few USTA League regulations changes for 2020, and one for 2019.  These can be found here.

Most of them are minor clarifications where something wasn't clearly stated or staff had received a lot of questions, and go into effect for the 2020 USTA League season.

But one goes into effect for 2019 and is near and dear to my heart.  That is the tie-breakers used for breaking standings ties.

I've written much about it so won't go into detail again, but how standings ties are broken according to the National regulations is frankly flawed in my opinion, and I went so far as to make a regulations change proposal to National to get it fixed.  Alas, it wasn't adopted for the 2020 regulations, but I'm pleased to see that Adam Hutchinson, PNW Director of Competition that I worked with to sponsor my proposal, recognized the issue and has made a change for 2019 to fix it for the One Doubles league run in the PNW section.

Specifically, One Doubles is a league where each "team" match is a single doubles match, which means the team record is the same as the individual wins/losses record making that component of the standings tie-breaker meaningless.  In situations like this, the flawed components of the National tie-breaker come into play a lot more often and there had been numerous situations where the less deserving team had advanced.

Adam had observed this, it is part of why he supported my proposal, and decided he could do something about it in PNW and did.  Here is the write-up of the change, but the summary is that instead of using the inequitable sets and games lost components in the absence of looking at sets and games won, sets won and games won will be used.

For example, consider two teams exactly equal on all counts except for one match against a common opponent.  Who should get 2nd place?   Team A lost their match 6-0,6-0, while team B lost their match 6-7,7-6,1-0.  You would think that the team that got blown out is less deserving, but under the National regulation, team A, the one not winning a game, would advance having lost the same number of sets (2) and having lost fewer games (12 vs 14)!  With Adam's change, team B would advance first as they won a set in their loss (1 vs 0), but also clearly won more games (13 vs 0) if it came to that.

This, IMHO, is clearly fairer and will avoid the occasional situation where the "wrong" team advances.

Thanks Adam!

NorCal USTA Un-flighted Round Robin - What should have been expected?

I just wrote about NorCal using the new un-flighted round-robin format for 40 & Over Districts last month where a 4.0 mens team went undefeated and is not going to Sectionals as there were four others and they finished 5th.

That seems like a bad thing, so I went about researching if this was a freak occurrence, or if it could have been known in advance that it was likely to happen.

I'll say up front, just looking at a situation where there are 22 teams, each only playing 3 matches against random opponents, it screams to me that it was likely for there to be a lot of undefeated teams, but let's do some real analysis to see just how likely.

To do this, I'm using my Flight Simulation Report that uses my Estimated Dynamic NTRP Ratings for the players on each team to go through one million simulations of each team's schedule ,with some random variability into how each team will do, tallying up what the most likely record will be for each team and what the standings will be.  Also, as part of doing this, I can look at how often specific situations occur, like what percentage of the time there are varying numbers of undefeated teams.

So what did it all say?


The simulation said the most likely resulting records would have 4 teams all 3-0 which would have been nice and clean.  The 4 teams in this most likely scenario were San Carlos, Bay Club, Seascape, and Walnut Creek and it turns out 3 of these teams did all finish undefeated.  So the simulation isn't too bad!

The chances of any 4 teams finishing undefeated was 41%, so pretty likely, but a lot of room for other scenarios.  Here is how the others were predicted:

• Three - 20%
• Four - 41%
• Five - 30%
• Six - 5%
• Seven - 0.3%
• Eight - 0.01%

Yes folks, with this format and the schedule they had, there was the possibility of eight (8) teams ending up undefeated!  Yes, it is a very slim chance, and similarly for seven, but still technically possible.

The bigger thing is that a still substantial six undefeated had a 5% chance, meaning if you hold this event 20 times it is likely that you'd have six undefeated teams once.  Having a format where that is reasonably possible is just silly!

The chance of five undefeated was an even higher 30%, nearly as likely as the most likely scenario of four undefeated.  This is in fact what happened and clearly it was not a freak occurrence but should have been reasonably expected it could happen.  Add up the chances of five or more and you are over 33%, so this is saying one of these was expected to occur in one of every three times the event would be played.

With this many teams playing just three matches, the chances of a tie for fourth place (the last spot advancing to Sectionals) is very high, and when it occurs, it is more often that not going to be very big.  Basically any time there aren't exactly four undefeated, you are going to have a large tie at 2-1.  The number of teams tied could in theory be as large as 16, but is more typically expected to be between 5 and 10 teams, still very big and highlighting the inadequacies of the current tie-breakers, especially when just three matches are played as that gives very little information to differentiate with.

What about other flights?

The women's 4.0 flight had 20 teams and fortunately only had three undefeated teams.  But what did the simulation say was likely?

Here are the chances:

• Three - 36%
• Four - 38%
• Five - 11%
• Six - 1.3%
• Seven - 0.05%
• Eight - 3 of the million scenarios

We see the chances of of "bad" situations is quite a bit lower, this is in part to having two fewer teams, but also the strength of the teams and how the schedule was laid out.  Still, there was a significant chance, 12+%, of five or more teams being undefeated even if one of the more likely three actually occurred.  Hold this even eight times it is likely that once you will have a "situation".

Another 20 team flight was the 3.5 women.  This ended up having a nice and clean four undefeated teams, but what were the possibilities?

• Three - 38%
• Four - 35%
• Five - 10%
• Six - 0.7%
• Seven - 0.01%
• Eight - 1 of the million scenarios

This is quite similar to the women's 4.0 flight, and one of the most likely scenarios occurred.  But there was still an 11+% chance of five or more, so it is likely to happen one of every nine times.

In fact, there was a team that was 2-1 in 5th place that lost a team match 3-2 on a super tie-break loss.  Had they won that super tie-break, there would have been five undefeated teams and controversy would ensue again.

I did not go through the other flights, there were fewer teams there so less chance of problems occurring, although the chances were by no means zero.

I think the above shows though that it was a little short-sighted to implement this format the way they did.  So many teams playing un-flighted round-robin against only three opponents is ripe for this to happen and it seems having a format planned with these problems built in is not really fair to the participants.

Simply playing four matches per team would have significantly improved things and reduced, but not eliminated, the chances.  I wonder why that wasn't done?

What do you think?

NorCal USTA uses un-flighted round-robin for Districts, undefeated team doesn't advance!

I recently wrote that the new format used for Nationals last year, un-flight round-robin, is starting to be used for other earlier rounds of playoffs.  Several states in Southern are using it, but I also noticed that Northern California used it for their Districts last month and taking a closer look, found some interesting situations.

Specifically, Nationals generally has 17 teams (one per section) and each team playing 4 matches, and this is enough to have some potential disasters such as very large groups of teams going into standings tie-breakers to see who advances, or even undefeated teams not advancing.

NorCal appears to have used this format with as many as 22 (!) teams and each team only playing 3 matches.  In my mind, this is a recipe for disaster as with that many teams, there is no way to avoid the possibility of 5 (or more) undefeated teams (and only 4 move on to Sectionals), and it is hard to get meaningful differentiation in the standings playing only 3 matches, especially given teams would have wildly different strengths of schedule.

But instead of me just raising the warning flag, let's take a look and see what actually happened.

Men's 4.0

This flight had a whopping 22 teams and disaster did occur here with five teams finishing undefeated at 3-0 and it appears, one of them not advancing on to Sectionals.  Teams 3 thru 5 were all tied at 10-5 on courts and they obviously didn't play each other, so it went to sets lost and one team had lost 13 sets vs 12 and 11 for the other two teams, so they were the one left out.  FWIW, my proposal I submitted to the USTA of using sets won/lost differential would have yielded the same order in this case.

But this is still brutal for the team that is left out.  You go to Districts and don't lose a team match, and aren't going on to Sectionals.  They very well could have had a tougher schedule than the other four teams and that is why they lost an extra court or set or two.  It is hard to understand why a format would be chosen like this with the likelihood of this happening so high.

Update: See this where I looked at the possible and expected scenarios for this scenario and a few other flights.

Men's 3.5

"Only" 18 teams and the standings ended up with three undefeated teams at 3-0 and a seven way tie for the fourth spot at 2-1.  This meant the flawed tie-breakers used kicked in, although in this case one team had a clearly better courts record at 12-3 vs the next best 9-6, so they advanced.

Men's 4.5+

Just 14 teams, three finished 3-0 with a three-way tie for the fourth spot.  One team had a one court better record on courts won/lost so they advanced, but is interesting that they had the same sets lost as the fifth place team and actually lost more games, so would have lost out on the flawed tie-breaker had it gotten to that point.

Men's 3.0

Just 12 teams, the chances of a situation with undefeated teams not really there, but there was a four way tie for third with the teams finishing 4th/5th tied on courts at 8-7, but one lost one more set (and won fewer too) so did not advance.

Women's 4.0

A good sized 20 teams in the flight and three undefeated teams at 3-0 leaving an eight way tie for fourth.  Worse, five of these teams were tied on courts at 9-6.  One team had lost one fewer set, so they were the team that advanced.

Women's 3.5

Also 20 teams in the flight and they lucked out with four 4-0 teams advancing.  There was a big seven-way tie for fifth giving an idea what kind of tie-breaker could have come into play.

Women's 3.0

There were 16 teams, just two went undefeated with a six-way tie for third at 2-1.  Two teams were both 10-5 on courts with the others behind so these two advanced.

Women's 4.5+

Just 14 teams, three teams undefeated with a three-way tie at 2-1 for fourth, one of those teams having a better courts won/lost record.


So there was not controversy at every level, but we did have (to my knowledge) the first case of an undefeated team being left out in this format, and several other very large tie-breaks where strength of schedule played a key role in who advanced since it came down to just a single court or even set.

I wonder if the USTA/NorCal really gave any thought to the possibility of sending an undefeated team home?  It was almost inevitable with this many teams and playing just three matches doesn't give much data to differentiate on and is very susceptible to strong/weak schedules skewing things.  I would hope they did, but then they apparently decided they were ok with it.

What do you think?  Is so many teams and so few matches taking this format too far?  Did you play at NorCal Districts and have first hand experience or feedback?

Some USTA districts are using un-flighted round-robin for 2019 playoffs - Beware of the standings tie-breakers!

Last year, USTA League Nationals used a brand new format, un-flighted round-robin, instead of having three or four flights of teams each playing a round-robin.  This meant that rather than four flight winners advancing to the semis, the top-four teams in one big flight would advance.

This format was great in that it guaranteed each team four instead of three matches, and gave a team, that was really good and just got a bad draw and lost early, a chance of still making the semis, but did introduce some new factors in deciding the top-4 teams.   Specifically, how do you compare teams that didn't play each other at all, to decide a top-4.

This meant some rarely used tie-breakers got invoked a lot, and unfortunately, in my opinion at least, these were flawed and choose the wrong team to advance several times.  I felt strongly enough about this that I proposed changes to the regulations to fix the tie-breakers, but alas they were not adopted, yet at least.

What is new for this year though is that this un-flighted round-robin (UFRR so I don't have to keep typing it) appears to be being used for more playoffs.  I've heard of at least two districts employing it later this month, and there very well could be more.

In most cases at the district level, I'm guessing the prior format was two flights of four teams, each team playing three round-robin matches and the flight winners facing off in a final.

In a UFRR, all the teams are put into one eight team flight and everyone plays four matches.  The fourth match is considered a perk to the teams as is the ability to advance to the final if you would have otherwise finished second in your flight in the old format.

The problem is, we still have the old tie-breakers that are going to be used.  And, depending on how the schedule is done, it is possible for three teams to all go undefeated but only two of those teams can advance to the final, and the current "challenged" tie-breakers will be used to determine those two teams.

I won't go into the details of what the problems are with the tie-breakers yet again (read this for a good summary), but I hope they don't come into play and pick the "wrong" team to advance.  My fear is that given the use of this format and tie-breakers enough times, it will happen again.

What format are your playoffs using?  Is a UFRR being used and if so, how many teams and how many matches?  What do you think of the format?

Leave a comment here or on Facebook.

Update: NorCal used the format for 40 & Over Districts and it resulted in a team that went undefeated not advancing to Sectionals.  Read about it here.

2019 Seattle area 18 & Over nearly complete, playoffs in June

The 18 & Over league in Seattle is approaching the last couple weeks of the season and who will advance to playoffs is still in doubt in nearly every sub-flight.

Thankfully, due to the efforts of our League Coordinator, we will have the top-2 teams from each sub-flight advancing to local playoffs, the "wildcard" round being held June 7-9 and then the conclusion of local playoffs June 14-16.

As I understand it, the wildcard weekend matches will be played, where possible, at the higher seed's facility, but all of that is expected to be confirmed on June 3 when the draws and schedules/sites should come out.

Good luck to those teams still vying for a playoff spot!