Sounds about right to me. The problem is the "interpretation" of the guidelines has remained static, but the reality of the competition at any given level has indeed changed.
It's telling that when people honestly make a mistake (as opposed to a blatant attempt to sandbag) - they pretty much never rate themselves too low. Sure, some of that is aspirational or wishful thinking, but not enough to account for what's going on.
It really comes down to this: is the USTA helping grow the sport with its current implementation of the NTRP? I say no. In fact, I think tennis in the US soldiers on DESPITE the USTA's efforts.
As for the USTA defenders - raise your hands if even half of your USTA matches have been legitimately competitive. I had maybe 2 or 3 matches out of a dozen that could have gone either way. All the others had me blowing them out, or being blown out, and I was neither playing up, nor down.
Ive seen this thread in our local league, although I blame the appeal system and self rating for the most part.
When I first started my 3.5 team in 2004, I graded all the teams. You can believe me or not, but I know most of the players/teams on every team, my friends are teaching pros and I am good at ranking players. (in fact in our 8 team division I correctly predicted what place every team would be in, not including us of course)
I graded teams A-F.
"A" teams were usually those teams that always tended to win first place every single year and very rarely ever lost a team match in local competition. (one team to this date has lost 6 in 7 years)
"B" teams were these teams that were always in 2nd place. They usually beat everyone else and were very formitable but always came up short of moving on to the next level.
"D" and "F" teams were bad teams. For whatever reason they were always in last, or near last consistantly. (some of these teams are really 3.0 teams in the 3.5 league and some of them just dont win for whatever reason)
The rest were "C" teams which I considered to the average teams and on any given year could finish anywhere from 3rd to 6th place depending on how they were doing. Out of 32 3.5 teams, I would consider that slightly more than half of those were average teams.
Over the past couple years it hasnt been like that at all. Ive been in two 6 team divisions where there are 3 or 4 teams that I would consider a A or a B team in 2004. I do this because of the players, they either have an over abundance of appealees or a lot of new self rates.
And we still have the bad teams from 2004, so it's like oh please said, if you are an average team, you are probally rarely seeing a match that could go either way.
That's here in my area though. Some of the good chances though have been that now new teams seem to win every year, however they are usually doing it because there is an arms race to keep appealing players and find new self-rates. If you dont appeal your players, you are almost looking at ending up in the bottom of your division the next year which is no fun.
(or for some of you who only want to win first, I'll still say that it's still less fun then taking 2nd or 3rd)
