An experimental junior tennis event sparks excitement in Atlanta
[Reprinted from UniversalTennis.com; By Craig Lambert]
Sure, tennis is thriving in Atlanta—150,000 people play in some type of competitive framework. But even in this tennis boomtown, something was tailing off among junior players. David Stolle, who co-founded Atlanta’s Universal Tennis Academy (UTA) in 1996, could sense it among the organization’s 1,000 junior players, many of whom he helps with college recruiting and placement. “Over the last 10 or 15 years,” he says, “when we set up practice matches, the desire to compete, and the level of effort, had declined. As coaches, how can we stimulate the excitement, even the nervousness, of tournament play in a less structured situation? Today’s kids seem to have a hard time setting up practice matches on their own. We decided to hand them the responsibility for arranging the matches, and find a way to have something riding on every match.”
The academy tried an experiment this spring to accomplish this. It designed a special round-robin tournament that lasted more than a month, from early April until the finals on May 15. Instead of a traditional elimination format, which presents problems like unlucky draws and frequent mismatches, UTA organized 72 junior players ranging from nine to 18 years of age into 18 brackets of four players each. These foursomes were comprised of people who lived fairly near each other.
Skill levels among the 72 entrants varied widely, from those with Universal Tennis Ratings (UTRs) of 2.0 (near beginners) to others above 11.0 (college varsity level). Hence, to produce good matches, the organizers selected groups of four with UTRs all within 1.0 of each other, or as close as possible to that. Age and sex played no part in bracketing. “We had some unbelievable matches as a result,” Stolle recalls. “For example, a 12-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy battled it out for three hours. She finally won it, 6-4 in the third set.”
Indeed, the UTR-based brackets produced loads of close contests: for players with enough data to generate reliable UTRs, 60 percent of matches were competitive. This ratio is consistent with a wealth of research by UTR founder Dave Howell. (UTR’s definition of a competitive match is one whose final score is 6-4, 6-3 or closer.) A high proportion of competitive matches characterizes level-based play, and 60 percent signifies a fiercely contested tournament. Remarkably, that ratio more than doubles, or even triples, rates observed in local junior tournaments in the United States, which commonly find only 20 or 25 percent of their matches reaching the competitive threshold of 6-4, 6-3 or better.
The Atlanta event opened with a month of round-robin play within each bracket. Each entrant had to play a best-of-three-set match against each of the other three in his or her foursome. They had 30 days, or about 10 days per match, to do so, arranging the games themselves and emailing in the results. Naturally, geographical proximity helped in scheduling. “UTR lets you play more matches without having to travel,” says Stolle. “You can spend time and resources on things that matter more.”
For the event’s final weekend, the academy brought the 18 bracket champions to a central location and organized them into seven draws on the basis of UTRs, again ensuring that no one would have to play an opponent more than 1.0 away from them in UTR. Using small elimination draws, they crowned seven champions.
“The event did what it set out to do,” Stolle declares. “There were more competitive matches, the juniors prepared better for their matches and competed better during them. Kids played against people they would not have played otherwise. The majority had a positive experience.” The Academy plans to do a similar event this fall, and twice a year going forward.
The tourney’s success rested in large part on the Academy’s work in educating its members about UTR and preparing them to “think outside the box of how they’d envisioned junior tennis,” says Stolle. Academy staff like tournament assistant Wendy English had many one-on-one conversations as well as email exchanges with players and parents to help them understand the purpose of UTR. They’d also staged previous UTR-driven events. “When you see what UTR does on the court, that solidifies what we’ve been talking about,” says Stolle.
“They [at UTA] have also educated the market in Atlanta as to how important UTR is to college tennis recruiting,” says Randy Jenks, director of events for UTR. Many Atlanta juniors would, of course, like to play college ball, and “the ITA [Intercollegiate Tennis Association] is on board with this,” Stolle observes, adding, “When I talk about a boy to college coaches, the first thing they ask is, ‘What’s his UTR?’ ”
In this regard, Stolle compares a UTR to a golf handicap, which a player can take anywhere and maintain throughout a lifetime of drives, chips, and putts. But in tennis, a regional ranking like #20 in Georgia does not necessarily translate into any known ranking in Massachusetts. UTR, in contrast, is portable worldwide.
Furthermore, when juniors turn 12, 14, or 16, “they don’t age out of anything,” Stolle says. “You don’t have to worry about losing your points, because your UTR continues unchanged. It reflects only your skill, not your age. Tennis is a sport for a lifetime—and UTR is the first system that allows you to have a rating for a lifetime.”
You can visit Universal Tennis Academy’s website at www.utatennis.com or follow them on Facebook, or Twitter.
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