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Monday, October 1, 2007

Tennis Recruiting Names Blue Chips for 2007-08; Tiley's Take on Aussie Wins in Italy

Today the Tennis Recruiting Network released its "Top Prospect" rankings, using its rating system to select Blue Chip, Five, Four, Three, Two and One star tennis players based on play through August of 2007. As a regular contributor to the site, I'm probably don't have the most objective view, but I've always thought that head-to-head rankings are superior to those based on points-per-round, and these designations are based on head-to-head results. While you're there, you might want to look at the verbal commitments for the class of 2008, which are found in the upper left-hand corner. Notre Dame has two blue chippers already: Shannon Mathews and Kristy Frilling.

The ITF website has the story on Australia's Junior Davis Cup and Junior Fed Cup wins posted. The final standings show the U.S. girls finishing fifth and the U.S. boys sixth. Craig Tiley, Australia's director of player development, has a some interesting things to say about Australia's junior dominance this year and drops a statistic I had not heard before.

...history tells us that more than 60 per cent of kids ranked into the top 10 convert into successful professional players, so it's a numbers game...

For the entire story from The Age, click here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Colette,

I too, have always felt that head to head was more definitive than how far you advance in a tourney, especially for juniors.

I believe this gives a better picture (more representative) of the junior player as they compare to one another.

Anonymous said...

After reading the Aussie story it only confirms why I said we should send our best players. We could have sent a winning team. Chase Buchanan, Rhyne Williams, Ryan Harrison, Devin Britton, Alex Domijan, Tenys Sandgren. Now everyone is talking about what a great job the Aussies are doing. All they did was send their best players regardless of age. What a novel idea. Now everyone is talking about Craig Tiley like he's a guru of some sort. Maybe if we actually send our best players people will start talking about how smart the people at the U.S.T.A. are.

Anonymous said...

many countries don't send their best players to the team competitions. just as a lot of the top juniors haven't played the junior slams the last few years because they have moved on to the pro events. we'll have a much better read on who is doing the best job of identifying potential and developing it when we see who wins the professional grand slam events and reaches the top 10 or top 20 in the pros.

Jerry's Dallas said...

Thanks for this story. I did a little blurb about the guys from my hometown on the list -- and I included links to the Zoo and Tennis Recruiting.