Taking Weekend Tennis Seriously

All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players

– William Shakespeare’s As You Like It

There’s a moment – a real, specific instance – at some point in your life in which you realize the USTA rating system aka the National Tennis Rating Program (NTRP) makes no sense.

You look up someone’s rating at the end of the year, let’s say, and you see what their rating is, and your jaw drops; you shake your head at the injustice of it all; and you feel sick to your stomach for that person because that number staring back at you next to that person’s name is the SILLIEST thing you’ve ever beholden.

That’s the moment.

Or my favorite: you look up someone’s rating at the end of the year just for giggles, and you see what their rating is, and there’s a beat in time to allow your eyes to adjust/do a double-take and for your brain to digest the number staring back at you next to that person’s name and then…the next thing you know you’re rolling on the ground laughing your a—off because that is the SILLIEST thing you’ve ever beholden.

That’s the moment.

Kevin Schmidt has apparently cracked the mysterious algorithm the NTRP uses and can sell you a detailed report of your rating (nope, I haven’t bought one; I’ll dutifully post about it if I do). On his Computer Ratings blog, he also has such fun facts as:

• Only matches played by October 27^th were used to calculate the 2013 year-end ratings that came out on December 2^nd.*
• Win/loss records do not matter. It’s all about the scores and the ratings of the other players. (This USTA site explains it thusly: the computer predicts the number of games that will be won by each team given each player’s current dynamic rating [undisclosed ratings that go out to a hundredth of a point] and then adjusts those ratings accordingly with the actual results)

*Can this October 27^th information be found on a USTA sanctioned website? That’s an actual question I’d like to know the answer to.

As the average person, how am I supposed to wrap my head around the fact that this national tennis league I invest a lot of time in uses an unknown formula that doesn’t consistently pass the eyeball test?

The eyeball test here refers to just looking at the match results, but of course, we’ve all seen someone play and thought that person had been assessed the wrong rating.

And you know what the powers that be would say? You can’t use the eyeball test to gauge people’s ratings. That’s like the whole point of the system!

Oh. No, yeah…um… of course; that’s…that’s totally cool.

NO, IT’S NOT COOL. How am I supposed to be okay with how the system seems to make little to no sense, how the results seem to not matter, how all of THIS – the training, the sweat, the tears, the drama, the money wasted, the time taken away – seems to be meaningless, and how the all-important ratings that sequester us away from each other seem to have little rhyme or reason to them as they’re doled out to us and we sheep just have to accept them as law every several months until the next unstable ruling comes down on us?

HOW?

By believing that the NTRP is a sentient being.

You heard me. The NTRP is alive, y’all. It feels; it perceives; and it decides based on its own whims and subjectivity…and whatever gift sacrifices people have offered up.

Its name is Puck.

Every time you question a rating, every time there’s an obvious hiccup with the level assignments – that’s Puck. The little imp just wants to see us scurry madly about as our self-esteem gets knocked around and we’re forced to reassess our tennis plans for the upcoming months based on its mischievous decrees.

It’s all starting to make sense now, don’t you think?

And yes, clearly Puck tells people’s ratings information to Kevin for a share of the profits.

So it appears that every 4.5 mid-year bump-up in the women’s side in my area stayed at 4.5 for the 2014 season no matter what. Now some people around these here parts would contend most of the bump-ups were at least a season overdue. The system seems to have finally wised up to what was going on in my area and flushed a slew of people out of 4.0. And you know what? I’m fine with that. You wanna make everyone stay a 4.5 so they can’t play with their food anymore as a bunch of them had for at least a season now? No problem.

But of course, not everyone stayed a 4.5. Enter Puck stage left. That sly devil couldn’t leave well enough alone so it chose at least one early season 4.5 rated player to play 2014 as a 4.0 while the rest of us look on.

As I eyeball her Fall USTA season, I don’t understand why she was bumped down over others whose results seemed to warrant such an action more so (not because of their playing ability, just strictly because of their results). She ended up winning the rest of her 4.5 matches that oh, hey, don’t count towards her 2013 year-end rating. How is she magically able to win them when by definition she shouldn’t even be on the same court as the actual 4.5s?*

*Don’t even get me started on the recent 4.0 sanctioned doubles match that was won by someone who Puck ultimately decided was a 3.5 over someone whom Puck declared a 4.5 at year-end. There are not enough words…

There’s also no difference in her quality of play compared to the rest of us early season bump-ups doing our best impressions of 4.5 tennis. As I play against her repeatedly and lose, I again don’t understand why she – Oh, sorry! I was thinking there would be some clear, worldly, apparent logic I could use to take this all in. But no, no. It was Puck.

What probably happened is that she didn’t provide an ample enough offering to Puck.

Or did she, in fact, give Puck an excellent present? 😉

The aftermath of the great 4.0 purge is that the landscape of my area’s 4.0 world is very different now from where it was at the beginning of the 2013 Spring season. There are many 4.0 captains looking around going, “YES. Finally! I have a legitimate shot of advancing in 2014!!”

Those captains have the same teams with the same players from 2013. They might have finished low to middle of the pack earlier this year. Now they are the favorites to advance to the 2014 USTA Play-offs.

And why is that? Just because most of the competition is gone. Simply because the standard for this level has changed.

What a difference a year makes, huh? What a laughable difference. Don’t everyone get too comfortable now. Just wait till 2015 when Puck decides to have everyone bumped down and once again these levels are redefined based on what that “knavish sprite” sneezes upon us.

Updated: Todd Reed, the NTRP Coordinator for the USTA Texas Section, confirmed that 1) October 27th was indeed the deadline for calculating 2013 Year End Ratings and 2) that information cannot be found on a USTA sanctioned website.