The NTRP with kids is tough. Since some are great for their age and theyll get better with time, its hard to rate a kid like that less than 5.0, even though if they played league tennis with men they probably fit well with 4.5, and also be able to compete with 5.0 but not win a whole lot probably. I play the # 30 something 16's usta player a few times a week and have given him some bagels and often he will get a few games and have competitive sets with me, I guess If i had to rate him id say he is a solid to strong 5.0. By the time he is 18 I have no doubt he will be a 5.5-6.0 and be able to play college tennis about anywhere he wants to.
btw im out of college now, 24 yrs of age, I dont think im old but I cant believe my age and how fast it goes
This is a very good point, and opens up a whole new topic of discussion with respect to NTRP ratings. (In fact, we could start a separate thread, if there were interest.) The same issue applies to older players. Someone who was a top tour player (for sake of argument, let's say ATP Top 10) was at some point a 7.0 by definition. But with age, that same player may eventually play anywhere on down to the equivalent of a 4.0 level competitively at some point in his life. How do you rate players like this?
The bigger issue is whether the NTRP is being used as a metric of stroke production so that lessons can be given properly, or is it a measure of whom a player can beat, and therefore to be used for league/tournament handicapping. The problem is that it's being used for both, but the two purposes don't mirror each other in terms of needs or analysis. You can't use the same standards for both. As we've seen, there are players with major stroke flaws, even at the world class level. There are also players with great mechanical games who lose to lesser physical players because of other reasons (ranging from speed to mental toughness to competitive fire to....).
When the NTRP was created/invented, the intention was to classify stroking levels, and it was used as such. It was intended to be a tool for instructors, not a rating system for handicapping playa, though they didn't really think through how it would evolve, and had imagined it would work as both. However, because having a handicapping system was in such demand, it became repurposed as such. Since then, as the idea of the NTRP league play became more widespread, the ratings have become distorted, and in some cases compressed (which is why people are so loathe to hand out precious 5.0 ratings, when originally the designation was meant to apply to a club level "A" player. Anyone with a sectional/regional ranking was, under the original system, defined as at least a 5.0, and usually a 5.5. Anyone with any kind of national ranking was meant to be a 5.5 - 6.0. It was assumed that obviously the equivalent level player in the open category would smoke the same level in, say, the 55s. But that 55 year old was still a 5.5 (not, say, a 4.5 based on which open players he could beat).
The further result has been that people's competitive natures have caused those in leagues, etc. to play in as low an NTRP category as possible. This is why you have former Davis Cup players in the 4.5 leagues now (as well as top 10 sectional open players), rather than in the 6.0+ category that was automatic for them under the original system. In a nutshell, in the standard used when NTRP was invented, a player couldn't go down in level by getting older, and wasn't really penalized for rustiness. This is a far cry from how many use it now.
So when we discuss a player and his relative NTRP level, there's bound to be a lot of disagreement on how to classify him. If we can't even get the scale or goals in line with each other, there's no way to use the system accurately.
