Tennis recruiting rankings seriously flawed

[Misterbill]

Originally Posted by ClarkC

Yes, that is the issue. You see, if the birthdates are posted publicly, then when player A beats player B, player B's dad can make the excuse that player A is a certain age. Or, if player A is a 5-star in the class of 2015 and player B is a 4-star in the class of 2014, player B's dad can tell everyone that player A really ought to be in the class of 2014, in which case he would not be ranked any higher than player B.

If the age is a secret, then the age basis for excuse-making and *****ing and whining and putting down other players is not there for everyone to see.

Thanks for my laugh of the day............and as they say, the truth is often told in jest!

[Tennisstringz]

Originally Posted by tball2day

Are you serious? It's not fair? This is competitive tennis, not t-ball where everyone gets equal times at bat. Get in shape or get off the court. It's that simple. If it's too hot for junior, or he/she has had a long match and they are too tired or out of shape, whichever, they can withdraw before they start playing. Every player faces unusual challenges of some kind at some point in their playing career. The strong survive, that's competition.

What do coaches want... The player in best shape / best heat tolerance/ endurance... Or the best tennis player?

[Tennisstringz]

Originally Posted by Misterbill

Thanks for my laugh of the day............and as they say, the truth is often told in jest!

Who gives a crap about star rankings until junior year in high school? It is determibed by what grade you are in, not age.

You will find the following junior year...

If you want to play in an Div 1 NCAA top 50 program, you better have five stars or you re assumed to not fit.

If you want d 1 mid major, you better be four stars.

If you are three stars, better look really good on film or have a huge serve or weapon to develop... Or no d1 for you.

[andfor]

Originally Posted by Tennisstringz

What do coaches want... The player in best shape / best heat tolerance/ endurance... Or the best tennis player?

The good coaches want both.....

[Misterbill]

Originally Posted by Tennisstringz

Who gives a crap about star rankings until junior year in high school?

Now that's a knee-slapper.

Spend a little more time around this board, and you will see how many people are focused on this!

(I generally agree with the rest of your post)

[10ismom]

^^^ and if you dig deep enough, you will find several kids being held back before getting to high school.

The scholarship chasing game has gone too far.
In our family, we cannot "sacrifice" education for a tennis scholarship.

[Misterbill]

Originally Posted by 10ismom

^^^ and if you dig deep enough, you will find several kids being held back before getting to high school.

The scholarship chasing game has gone too far.
In our family, we cannot "sacrifice" education for a tennis scholarship.

Same here. If you are suggesting I ever said or hinted that, please show where, and I will retract

[10ismom]

I thought you might have hinted my previous posts in this thread (if you remembered) was a fixate on TRN for middle schoolers.
In reality, I just posted my observation on a person trying to add a star or two rolling back a grade.

[Misterbill]

Originally Posted by 10ismom

I thought you might have hinted my previous posts in this thread (if you remembered) was a fixate on TRN for middle schoolers.
In reality, I just posted my observation on a person trying to add a star or two rolling back a grade.

Quote up what I said, and if your thinking or reading bears any semblance to reality, I will retract.

Can't defend or retract something you "thought I might have hinted" without you showing the Board what it is

[10ismom]

Read my post#52, #74 and your post #85.
BTW, noone else would care and you don't have to retract anything.
It is just I'd rather clear any misunderstanding with you since we are frequent posters here.

[andfor]

Originally Posted by 10ismom

^^^ and if you dig deep enough, you will find several kids being held back before getting to high school.

The scholarship chasing game has gone too far.
In our family, we cannot "sacrifice" education for a tennis scholarship.

"Several kids being held back before getting to high school". Out of tens of thousands of kids who play tennis it may account for 1/100th of 1% who have done this with the intent you claim. It can't be proved any way. Focusing on what we can can control and we'll all enjoy things like tennis more.

[Misterbill]

Originally Posted by 10ismom

Read my post#52, #74 and your post #85.
BTW, noone else would care and you don't have to retract anything.
It is just I'd rather clear any misunderstanding with you since we are frequent posters here.

Right. I never said or hinted that I recommend people should sacrifice education for tennis.

[dannythomas]

Just came across this thread and apologies for re-opening the debate. My opinion is that the TR rankings are in many ways more meaningful than the USTA ones. When you look at the reasons some players are ranked higher or lower on the TR system it is because it devalues the points earned by kids / parents who drive up and down their State or even the country looking for cheap points from tournaments with low level competition. TR recognizes that and it is good.
One point I would like to make is that there is no recognition of doubles results in the TR system. In this respect I think the USTA system is better where 15% of doubles points count. I wonder why TR cannot do this, i would have thought college coaches are interested in doubles performance too ?
Also why do star ratings start from 6th graders ? There are a lot of 4th and 5th graders playing competitive tennis. I cant imagine it is because college coaches start being interested in players at age 11 but not 9 and 10. Just seems a little arbitrary and it would be nice to extend it to younger kids.

[WARPWOODIE]

Originally Posted by dannythomas

Just came across this thread and apologies for re-opening the debate. My opinion is that the TR rankings are in many ways more meaningful than the USTA ones. When you look at the reasons some players are ranked higher or lower on the TR system it is because it devalues the points earned by kids / parents who drive up and down their State or even the country looking for cheap points from tournaments with low level competition. TR recognizes that and it is good.
One point I would like to make is that there is no recognition of doubles results in the TR system. In this respect I think the USTA system is better where 15% of doubles points count. I wonder why TR cannot do this, i would have thought college coaches are interested in doubles performance too ?
Also why do star ratings start from 6th graders ? There are a lot of 4th and 5th graders playing competitive tennis. I cant imagine it is because college coaches start being interested in players at age 11 but not 9 and 10. Just seems a little arbitrary and it would be nice to extend it to younger kids.

I agree with you about the doubles. Doubles participation should be factored in somehow, especially when kids are play high quality L1-L3 level tennis. There has to be some algorithm to make this happen somehow....maybe some type of aggregate rating.

However, I don't agree with star rating for 4-6th graders. In fact, my feeling is that star rating shouldn't occur till freshmen year high school...when tournament results really count for kids planning on playing college tennis. Just like rankings in the 10s and 12s...they don't really mean anything. It just give kids and parents a false sense of security. Just my 2 cents.

[dannythomas]

I understand the point about star ratings too early. But to be honest every website benefits from having an entertainment factor and the kids and their parents do enjoy that feature of the site. I dont think it does any harm because nearly all of the younger kids / parents are only interested in the USTA rankings and the star rating is an interesting feature for them. No danger of it affecting their game in any way. At that age they are dreaming of the pro tour not planning or college. No reason that they shouldnt enjoy the site though.
Would be interested on TR's position on doubles !

[JLyon]

Originally Posted by Tennisstringz

Who gives a crap about star rankings until junior year in high school? It is determibed by what grade you are in, not age.

You will find the following junior year...

If you want to play in an Div 1 NCAA top 50 program, you better have five stars or you re assumed to not fit.

If you want d 1 mid major, you better be four stars.

If you are three stars, better look really good on film or have a huge serve or weapon to develop... Or no d1 for you.

you maybe focusing on Men, but a 2* and 3* girl can get a full scholarship at many smaller D1 schools. Local D1 in my town #2 player was a 3* Freshman. Look at several other schools and they have 2* and 3* players in the line-up and they are not just for filler/Title IX requirements.

[tennisgene]

Originally Posted by Tennisstringz

Who gives a crap about star rankings until junior year in high school? It is determibed by what grade you are in, not age.

You will find the following junior year...

If you want to play in an Div 1 NCAA top 50 program, you better have five stars or you re assumed to not fit.

If you want d 1 mid major, you better be four stars.

If you are three stars, better look really good on film or have a huge serve or weapon to develop... Or no d1 for you.

Rankings are always important, that's how you built up a kid that is getting ready to compete on bigger and bigger stages. If you start them earlier and they understand that their hard work is showing up somewhere it is very likely that they will try harder and push themselves more and more. It is different for some kids than others of-course..-

[BirdieLane]

TR consulted with many coaches as to what they wanted and the coaches wanted class lists with only singles factored in and so that's what they got.

[dallasoliver]

Originally Posted by dannythomas

Just came across this thread and apologies for re-opening the debate. My opinion is that the TR rankings are in many ways more meaningful than the USTA ones. When you look at the reasons some players are ranked higher or lower on the TR system it is because it devalues the points earned by kids / parents who drive up and down their State or even the country looking for cheap points from tournaments with low level competition. TR recognizes that and it is good.
One point I would like to make is that there is no recognition of doubles results in the TR system. In this respect I think the USTA system is better where 15% of doubles points count. I wonder why TR cannot do this, i would have thought college coaches are interested in doubles performance too ?

Hi Danny -

This is a question that has come up a lot over the years. (I actually took some of the material in this response from a previous posting.)

We currently do not include doubles play in our rankings or feature them prominently at TennisRecruiting.net. Why is this? I personally love doubles, and Julie Wrege (one of our founders who spent many years running the Girl's 14 Nationals in Atlanta) has always pushed for doubles to have prominence.

Our position is NOT because we find doubles unimportant. On the contrary, we would love to feature doubles more prominently. We are not doing more with doubles because it is a very difficult problem to tackle with a head-to-head ranking system.

Let me take a break to provide some background. (Apologies to those of you who already know all of this.) There are two kinds of ranking systems: (1) points-based systems, where players are fundamentally awarded points based on how far the progress in tournaments, and (2) head-to-head systems where players are assigned rank values based on who they beat. The USTA and (most of) its sections use points-based systems, and TennisRecruiting.net uses a head-to-head system.

Handling doubles in a points system is straightforward - just assign points to both players based on the round that they reach. You can even have a combined ranking that is a combination of point values from both singles and doubles.

In a head-to-head system, ranking with doubles is not so obvious. We tried some naïve things - like crediting both winners and penalizing both losers - but the resulting rankings were horrible. Combining doubles with singles failed just as badly. A second problem we ran into was data quality. We spend an enormous amount of time and money getting accurate data for singles. While the data quality for singles is pretty good, we have found it difficult to get good data for doubles.

So, to answer your question, we have approached this problem a couple of times, but the task always seemed daunting with no good solution - and even if there was a good solution we are unsure if we would be able to handle the problems of getting the data.

In the end, we have always decided to tackle much smaller problems that we knew we could solve - like including player photos, ranking recruiting classes, etc. We are a small company with very limited resources - we can only tackle a small number of features each year, and we want those features to have a good bang for the buck.

Hopefully we will find a way to feature doubles some day, but that day is probably far in the future.

Originally Posted by dannythomas

Also why do star ratings start from 6th graders ? There are a lot of 4th and 5th graders playing competitive tennis. I cant imagine it is because college coaches start being interested in players at age 11 but not 9 and 10. Just seems a little arbitrary and it would be nice to extend it to younger kids.

We talked about this when we started out. And you are correct - our choice of 6th grade is somewhat arbitrary. Here are a few reasons we start at 6th grade:

(1) Data for rankings really comes available in the 12-and-unders. There just isn't much data for the 10-and-unders. Most kids play 10&U until some time during the 5th grade.

(2) Honestly, ranking/rating elementary school kids at a website called TennisRecruiting.net seems a bit creepy. Our website does show some unofficial rankings for elementary school kids, but that is more of a mistake than anything else.

(3) We (obviously) have to cut things off somewhere. Middle and high school seems like a reasonable place to start.

(4) We debated whether or not to start our rankings/ratings in 9th grade, but introducing things in middle school gives players and parents a chance to learn about our site before it matters - so it is somewhat of an education and marketing tool for us.


I hope this helps.

Best,
Dallas

[ClarkC]

Here is something to consider with respect to doubles rankings. A player is at a tournament and guys are pairing up for doubles. An old friend, not quite at Player A's level, asks if Player A will team up with him. In a points system, if they earn no points, no harm done. In a head to head system, Player A has an incentive to be a snob about it and turn down the request. Not playing doubles at all is better for his ranking than playing and losing in the first round.

I love doubles, and precisely for that reason, I hope TRN does not do a doubles ranking. The unintended consequences could be destructive to the already underemphasized doubles aspect of junior tennis in the U.S.A.