Intermountain Section Better; Seeding Worse--Scott Gerber's Latest Analysis
A couple of weeks ago I posted Scott Gerber's short history of the points per round system the USTA uses for junior ranking, along with a link to his overview on high school tennis restrictions in the Midwest section. He's since passed along his latest study, the third he's completed, on what sections are the strongest, using points per player in the August USTA national championships as the measuring stick. To no one's surprise, I'm sure, Florida and Southern California top the list, but in third place this year is Intermountain, a section that has gained each of the three years Gerber has been crunching the numbers.
The entire study, complete with easy-to-follow graphs and breakdowns by gender and state can be downloaded at tennisfax.com. If you want to know who "The Big Six" are, what other section has, like Intermountain, gained in his measurement three years running, what sections are easiest to earn national points in, the poor performance of seeds this year, it's all in his report.
I will include portions of the summary from his national report (there is also a 2008 Midwest Closed report included in the complete document), in the hope it will encourage you to dig a little deeper.
• Florida and Southern California dominate junior tennis. The Midwest and Southern are close. It’s too early to tell if Intermountain is a one year wonder by blasting into third place but they have had three great years of improving performance. When seeing the success that Las Vegas is having, could Agassi be playing a role in these improvements, especially with the B12’s and B14’s?
• Seeding was good and now it is bad. Are parents and players getting more adept at gaming the points system?
• More tweaks necessary for a system that needs to be overhauled. It is easier and less expensive to acquire National Points if you live in smaller Sections (in terms of population and geographic area)....
• The Level 5 tournaments are the “meat and potato” tournaments that more (but not all) kids in the larger Sections can use to acquire national points. The larger Sections simply need more of these Level 5 tournaments.
• I saw a recent survey that questioned whether National Points should play a larger role in selecting participants in the National Championships. Based on this analysis, that is not a good idea for the largest Sections. (I don’t know how the politics of the USTA works but I would hope that it is more like a House of Representatives where Sections with the largest membership numbers receivefar more “votes” than the smaller Sections.)
• To end on a good note, congratulations and thanks to the Midwest for making its national Level 5 tournaments “Feed-In-Consolation” tournaments last year. This not only gave the kids more great, competitive matches, but it also gave them more National points.
1 comments:
That is quite an extensive report. I applaud the time and effort in the finding those answers.
Unfortantely, not every player who competes at Kalamazoo plays Sectional and National Open tournaments, like 3rd year players, Top 100 ITF players, top 1000 ATP players, wildcard entries, college players, and other players who just play ITF tournaments. I wonder if those numbers would change the statistics.
However, it is interesting where players get their points and finding where the top non-national players get their points, and what section is the deepest in that regard.
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