Bellis Sweeps Teen Tennis Titles; Australian Open Junior Draws; New Facebook Page Against USTA Junior Changes

In the final day of the Tennis Europe Level 1 14-and-under Aegon Teen Tennis Tournament in Bolton, CiCi Bellis added the singles title the doubles championship she won with Jaeda Daniel on Thursday. The fifth-seeded Bellis, a 13-year-old from Atherton, Calif., defeated unseeded Lucie Wargnier of France 6-2, 6-4 to claim the title.

Qualifier Corentin Moutet of France took the boys title with a 6-2, 6-3 victory over No. 3 seed Ergi Kirkin of Turkey. For complete draws, see the Tennis Europe website.

Les Petits As qualifying begins Saturday, and the draws are now posted at the tournament website. All eight US players are in the main draw.

We're just a few hours away from the start of the Australian Open Junior Championships, with six Americans--three boys and three girls--in the draw. Nicolas Jarry is listed as representing USA on the Australian Open website, but as Chile on the ITF junior website's draws, so I'm assuming that's just an error based on his recent change. I've requested clarification from Tennis Australia on this.

The big news with this morning's release of the draws was the late withdrawal of Yulia Putintseva of Kazakhstan, who was slated to be the number one seed. Since her withdrawal came after the draw was made, the next player that would have been seeded, Romania's Ilka Csoregi, moved into her spot at the top of the draw. The main beneficiaries of Putintseva's dropping out are Csoregi, lucky loser Bridget Liddell of New Zealand, and Croatia's Ana Konjuh, the No. 3 seed, who now is the only Top 4 seed in the top half.

If Konjuh was lucky, Thai Kwiatkowski of the US was not. The No. 12 seed and Orange Bowl semifinalist unluckily drew Thanasi Kokkinakis the 16-year-old Australian who played so well against Steve Johnson in the opening round of men's qualifying. Every junior slam needs a blockbuster first rounder, and I certainly would be courtside for that one if I were in Melbourne.  The Kokkinakis - Kwiatkowski match in not on Saturday's schedule, but four other Americans are.

Allie Kiick, the No. 15 seed, faces Italian Deborah Chiesa and Jamie Loeb plays unseeded Camilla Rosatello, also of Italy. Boys No. 13 seed Mackenzie McDonald, a semifinalist in Melbourne last year, plays Dukyoung Kim of Korea and unseeded Martin Redlicki faces No. 11 seed Borna Coric of Croatia for the second time in two months. Coric defeated Redlicki 1-6, 6-2, 6-1 in the first round of the Orange Bowl last month.

Christina Makarova, the No. 9 seed, is not on today's (Saturday in Australia) schedule. She will play Jelena Ostapenko of Latvia in her first round match.

The ITF preview, which doesn't mention the Putintseva withdrawal, is here.

Tom Walker, a respected junior development coach in Michigan, has been vocal regarding his objections to the USTA junior competition changes since they were first announced last year. This is the article he wrote for zootennis back in March, when the changes had yet to be voted on by the USTA's sections.

I spoke with Tom this morning, and he believes there is no advantage to adjustments and tweaks, and that the USTA must start again, from the beginning, with an open mind.

He has created a Facebook page devoted to his opposition to the changes, which can be found here.  His complete assessment of the best way to move forward is below.

This is page is dedicated to spotlighting the insane 2014 changes to the USTA National Junior Tournament Calendar and hopefully to motivate Dave Haggerty, Kurt Kamperman, the new Junior Tournament Competition Committee, the 17 Sections and the new USTA Board of Directors to permanently pause these changes and devise a new plan that is thoroughly vetted, transparent and agreed upon by the tennis industry at large.

Background:

Last year the USTA sections passed a sweeping new National Junior Tournament Plan that was to take effect in 2013 and 2014. This plan involved shrinking the opportunities to play National tournaments for US juniors by a significant margin.

The goal of the changes as stated by the USTA was to address three major concerns:

• The rising costs of competing at the national level for juniors and their families;
• The desire to reduce the amount of time juniors would be absent from school;
• The creation of a logical progression of earned advancement from local play to sectionals to nationals to ensure that the best players move on to nationals (the best have earned the right to play) – not the players from families with more economic flexibility.

While those stated goals are noble on the surface, many in the industry question if those were the actual goals and anyone with the slightest knowledge of junior tournament tennis quickly realized that the 2014 plan did exactly opposite of these stated goals for the overwhelming majority of players.

Cost – under the 2014 plan, players will have 9 chances to play National tournaments during the course of the year. If a player was going to play 9 national events in the year, they would now be completely wed to this schedule. You could likely poll first graders and realize that if a player had 9 chances to 9 events, it is going to cost more than if they had 30 or 40 chances to play 9 events.

School – school breaks and testing schedules have never been more fragmented. Again when choice is taken away, the homeschooled kids with flexible schedules or the lucky kids whose breaks and test schedules match up with the USTA schedule will be fine while the rest of the kids will be left missing more school and will have more balancing of tests and tournaments.

Earned Advancement – this is nothing more than propaganda to pretend like there are a bunch of rich kids flying around in private jets chasing points and unfairly advantaging themselves against the kids of lesser financial means. There has always been earned advancement. The 2014 plan doesn’t change any of the earned advancement for the rank and file junior tennis player, but it does give the USTA more wild cards so that their own players are not subject to have to play in their sections. So this plan of earned advancement not only doesn’t fix a problem that doesn’t exist, it creates a pathway for a few of the chosen ones to completely avoid earning their advancement.

So on all three stated goals, these changes completely fail any reasonable smell test.

The 2014 plan has been universally panned by an overwhelming majority of parents, coaches, junior players, college players, professional players, famous ex-pro players and virtually every person of significance in the tennis industry.

To the credit of some of the USTA brass in October of 2012, a group: Jon Vegosen (past USTA President,) Kurt Kamperman (USTA CEO of Community Tennis,) Dave Haggerty (USTA President,) Gordon Smith (USTA GM) and Bill Mountford (USTA rep) met with a resistance group of tennis parents and industry figures including: Antonio Mora (father of a junior,) Robert Sasseville (tournament director,) Steve Bellamy (father of 4 juniors and founder of Tennis Channel,) Sean Hannity (father of 2 juniors) and Kevin Kempin (father of 2 juniors and the CEO of Head.) From that meeting, the USTA agreed to “pause” the 2013 changes and have a “listening tour” in various parts of the country.

Right now as stated by the USTA President Dave Haggerty in the Atlanta meeting, “the 2014 changes will not go forward as they are now and their will likely be some sort of a compromise that puts some opportunity back on the table.”

The history of the changes are that Jon Vegosen (former President) enlisted Tim Russell (music professor no longer involved with the junior comp committee) and his committee of 20 (with whom virtually none were parents or coaches of junior players and 1/2 of whom are no longer on the committee) to come up with a new plan. That plan was then given to player development (who are no longer involved in the process) who supposedly were the ones who cut all the opportunity and gave themselves more wildcards.

This plan was then pushed around the USTA sections under the guise of cutting costs, upping school attendance, criminalizing the supposed points chasers and giving the sections back all their talent who were now playing Nationally. Although the plan was passed by a margin of 16 to 1, rampant were reports of anyone speaking out against the changes being ostracized, bullied to get on board and even fired. Many section leaders who voted for the changes now say that they would not have voted the way they did had they understood what they were voting for. Others have said they received substantial political pressure to vote for the changes. Basically an election in a country with a dictator took place to slam the changes through while Vegosen’s administration was in place.

Virtually no parent, coach, college coach or person in tennis was abridged of these changes prior to them being passed and there were specific directives from USTA managers not to let the tennis industry know about the changes until after they had passed.

Additionally, little foresight was given to the impact of the changes to college coaches. The changes will directly push a large portion of college coaches out of using their recruiting travel budgets for USTA events and move them to ITF events, therefore creating even less US players getting seen by college coaches which is the driving reason that many US kids play junior tennis.

We believe that these changes are going to be some of the most detrimental in the history of the sport and will basically do the following:

· Make junior tennis cost more

· Significantly detriment some kids school

· Overly benefit kids who can get wildcarded in

· Push more foreign players into college tennis by more exposure to college coaches

· Make kids quit tennis because so many kids will be playing the same kids week after week in their same section

There are many other negatives as well.

The goal of this page is to mobilize the tennis industry to push the USTA to get this process permanently paused and a new plan put in place that is transparent, smart and vetted by all the parties impacted in junior tennis.

In lay terms, WE DON’T WANT A COMPROMISE BY ADDING BACK OPPORTUNITY TO AN UNVETTED, BROKEN PLAN. WE WANT A NEW PLAN AND THE ABILITY TO WORK WITH THE USTA TO GET THE PLAN THAT IS BEST FOR US JUNIOR TENNIS.

Please try to get as many of your friends as possible to “like” this page