From that page, click on the event registration link for the event of your choice, and that will take you to the Play Tennis page for the event, and then find the "Match Schedule with Tennislink Stats & Standings" link and you will navigate to a Google Spreadsheet with the schedule in a grid.
Who do you think got an easy or hard schedule?
Serve Tennis has had some issues along the way as it was rolled out, so I was interested to see how it is working for an event like Nationals.
There are a few interesting quirks in using it for an event like this, I think due to Serve Tennis having been built, at least initially, and used for tournaments and not league play to this point.
One is that when signing up, even though you are on a team with singles and doubles courts, you are required to sign up for doubles as the only option. The tournament page does explain this but it is an interesting quirk I'd think they'd fix soon.
Then after you register yourself, you are asked to find/assign/refer your doubles partner to sign-up. This too is explained up front that you shouldn't do this but is a little extra noise one would hope wouldn't be there.
Another is that you are required to sign a waiver as you'd expect, but that is not done in Serve Tennis but instead in an entirely separate Jotform you have to copy/paste the URL in your browser to complete. I'd hope this would be integrated into Serve Tennis in the future as I'm sure many will miss it and have to scramble to do it prior to playing.
But it worked! Players are signing up for Nationals.
What has your experience been with Serve Tennis?
Over the past few weeks there has been just in my area/section:
I was fortunate to be on teams involved in three of those, and had friends/family playing in all of them, a busy few weekends.
The weather did play a part in some of the events. 18 & Over Sectionals had great weather with sun and 80s or even 90s, but last weekend there was some rain Sunday causing some disruption to matches and scrambling to find indoor courts, but the USTA and volunteer staff did a great job of getting everything in.
I was at 40 & Over Sectionals this past weekend and the forecast looked ominous as we neared the event with a good chance of rain Friday. Thankfully the USTA planned ahead and had enough indoor courts available that they were able to make the call to play pro-sets and juggle the schedule a bit to get all of the Friday matches in. There was rain early in the morning, and then a few showers so while some play could have occurred outside, it would have been interrupted and hectic while the adjusted indoor schedule went smoothly. The rest of the weekend was fine with just a short delay Saturday morning as the courts had to try from a brief overnight shower.
What areas won Sectionals this year?
For the 18 & Over we had:
So NWW took 8 of the 12.
In the 40 & Over this was the result:
Here NWW took 5 of the 10.
And yes, our section still uses 1 singles and 3 doubles for 40 & Over so we have to deal with the 2-2 ties. And some of the 3-1 wins were exceedingly close with match tie-breaks being two of the wins where either going the other way would have reversed the result with the 2-2 tie going to the other team on the games tie-breaker. Very close!
And there are more Sectionals coming up with Mixed 40 & Over and Mixed 55 & Over in just over three weeks.
Congratulations to all that played, competed, and won!
The 3.5 women had a whopping 18 teams in the flight, and only three matches scheduled for each team which creates a very good chance of the situation to happen. For comparison, there is a small chance of it happening at Nationals (and it has happened), and there they have 17 teams playing four matches so you can only imagine the risk goes way up with an additional team and one fewer match.
The way things played out, there were five undefeated teams and only four could advance, so one was sent home. Here were the standings:
So SD was left out, and worse, the broken standings tie-breakers bit them too! The tie-breaker is sets lost and BC and SD were tied, and the USTA chooses to ignore sets won and goes straight to games lost where SD and lost more games. Well, given they played, and won, two more sets, one can understand how they would have lost more games.
What do you think? Was SD given the short end of the stick and unfairly left out of the semis? Or every team knew the rules and just needed to play better.
Specifically, when you are logged in, there is supposed to be a summary that shows your NTRP level and your WTN, both singles and doubles. This is great, except ...
The example they included in the e-mail, at least the one I received, is a bit nonsensical. It lists the following information on the dashboard:
Moving on, when you login and go to the Home page, there is no sign of the player summary dashboard. You see a huge image with the text "National Tennis Players" that takes up a good half to two-thirds of the screen depending on your resolution and how big you have your browser window, and scrolling down a half page or more still reveals nothing about the player summary dashboard.
There is a link on the right near the top of the page to navigate to "My Profile" and doing so does get to a page that has some profile information, but at least on my browser on a laptop, I don't see the player summary dashboard. Here though i can scroll down a page and see my NTRP level and both WTN ratings, but it is laid out differently than the example in the e-mail. So where is this new player summary dashboard?
It turns out that back on the Home page, if you scroll down a page and a half or more, you finally get to the summary like was in the e-mail. It is a reasonably nice layout of the pertinent information all in one place so that is nice, but it would be nice if one didn't have to do so much scrolling or navigating to get to it. UTR for example has your rating right at the very top of the page, and on the profile page even begins to show some recent matches without having to scroll.
So the summary is nice, but it would be better if it was more prominently displayed or easier to get to.
Another observation is that I have been a C rated player for years, but the summary has a spot for a self-rated skill level that I can select. I'm not sure what the meaning of that would be, but it is there.
There is another button on the summary to "Scout" players. It sounds like something useful, but does nothing but take you to the existing page to search for a player. Note that this search is more useful than the one on the WTN site.
On the profile is big "World Tennis Number" text that is a link to the WTN site, but that is all it goes to, the generic site. If you navigate to another player's profile, then there is a link to view their WTN profile and it goes directly to them, but that doesn't show up for me on my profile which is odd.
Regarding the WTN site, their search is terrible. Trying to search for friends and teammates by name often doesn't bring them up, but brings up other players with a matching first name but a different last name than I searched for. And when you find a player to have to ensure animations to show the WTN to see the number. It is all very awkward and the USTA site is actually better for this for the most part.
What do you think of the new summary? Do you even care about tracking your WTN? Do you find either of the USTA or WTN sites useful to go scout players?
It has even happened at Nationals, twice in fact, as while the use of the format there has a low chance of it happening, it is possible.
It has happened in NorCal, and I believe they have changed their format to avoid the issue.
The Southern California section has flirted with disaster in the past, more than once, as they insist on having on the order of 18 teams in a flight use the format with just three matches played, a recipe for disaster. Well, they continue to do it in 2024.
SoCal has a varying number of teams in the one large flight and then they generally have them play three matches with the top-4 in the standings advancing on to the semis. If there are enough teams, generally around 14 or more, it is not only impossible to have a schedule guaranteed to avoid more than four undefeated teams, but the chances of it happening are real.
Last weekend they had:
I understand that to get to 18 teams, the section may have even awarded wildcards to teams that didn't win their area or flight. If so, exacerbating the problem just to give wildcards also seems questionable. No wildcards and 16 teams reduces the risk with unflighted round-robin, or with 16 teams you can have four flights of four.
I'm not sure why SoCal keeps doing this, it will bite them at some point.
A 2025 regulations link has shown up on the USTA League Resources page, and here are my observations from a quick read through the document.
The document does not say "Draft" like some others in the past have at this time of year, so I assume it is official, but you never know if they'll decide to change something.
The only "Major Regulation Change" listed at the beginning of the document has to do with a section filing a grievance against a team for full team defaults, so at a high level there are no big changes coming. This is a bit odd, I think most every year I've been reviewing this has had a handful of changes so I guess the USTA thought the regulations were in a good spot already.
The 2024 regulations allowed for Sections to run Mixed leagues as straight-level leagues (3.0, 3.5, 4.0, etc.) instead of combined levels (6.0, 7.0, 8.0, etc.) through Sectionals and there had been speculation that was a precursor to Nationals changing to straight-levels in 2025, but that does not seem to be the case. I'm only aware of Southern choosing to implement this so far.
In fact, the only other highlighted changes in the document are related to full team defaults or matches where the majority of matches are not played. So for all intents and purposes, 2025 has the same regulations as 2024.
At Nationals last year there was some pretty severe ratings manipulation that led to a double National champ, and there was a thought that perhaps the USTA would do something to crack down on it, but nothing in the regulations despite my offering a host of options.
Last, we had an undefeated team at Nationals not make the semis last year, and there was again speculation that might lead to some sort of change to address the scenario, but as it relates to the regulations, no change there. That isn't to say documents about the event itself couldn't address changes to the format, but so far all FAQs I've seen don't indicate any change.
What do you think? What regulation change were you hoping for?
