ITF Doubles Format Change for Grade A and Grade 1 Junior Tournaments

My suspicions regarding the change in the format for junior doubles was confirmed yesterday by the ITF, and if I had looked a little more diligently, I could have seen it on the ITF junior website. The announcement, with a posted date of 11/13/07, can be viewed here.

In Grade A and Grade 1 tournaments, no-ad scoring will be used, and split-set matches will be decided by the match tiebreaker. This includes the junior Grand Slams, who can opt out if they so choose.

There's absolutely no question that this is the way doubles is going on all levels above the juniors. In September, the ITF Futures circuit adopted the no-ad, match tiebreaker format and the WTA also converted to it this summer. This is not my personal preference--I could live with the match tiebreaker, but I hate no-ad scoring--but I recognize that shortening matches on the professional level has its attraction. Many of the reasons for moving in this direction, however, involve television and money, and those are not considerations for junior tournaments. Professional tournament directors want more stars playing doubles, and see doubles "specialists" as an expense they could do without. The ITF, on the other hand, sees its role in the juniors as preparing players for the next level, and this leads to its current quandary.

In 2004, the ITF introduced a "combined ranking" which includes both singles and doubles results to rank a player. According to the ITF website, "the introduction of the Combined Junior Ranking aims to encourage the doubles game at junior level and subsequently at professional level" (emphasis mine). This change has worked at the junior level, with more highly-ranked juniors playing doubles now, and from a development standpoint, it doesn't hurt to have another venue for a junior to work on his or her game. The USTA has started to combine rankings this year hoping to spur more doubles play on the national level.

But the professionals don't have combined rankings. There are singles rankings and doubles rankings and you get into tournaments based on those separate numbers. And the ITF certainly sees that the erosion of doubles is here and is a fact of life on the professional tour. It's why they've instituted this change for the high-level junior events, where future pros are most likely to play. But they are trying to have it both ways: trying to boost the importance of doubles by including it the singles rankings and to diminish it by going to this abbreviated scoring. The sensible thing to do is to abandon the combined ranking, which gives doubles prominence it no longer commands.