USTA 4.5 Allstar team

[Matt Shumway]

I just thought I'd bring up a situation our 4.5 team ran into last week and see what thoughts anybody has on this. My club 4.5 team went to sectionals last year. We have an even better team this year and were undefeated until last week. One of the of the other teams has assembled an allstar lineup made up of all the best players in our league from five different teams (except our team). They have an A and a B team. They bring out the B team for most matches. For our match, they brought out the A team and kicked our butts. None of the guys that played belonged to the club they are playing out of. Some of the guys hadn't even met before and were asking us where there team was warming up. Others were introducing themselves to their doubles partners before the matches. We were essentially playing a 5.0 team. Several of these guys were bumped to 5.0 but got petitioned back down. This team was assembled specifically to beat our team and get to sectionals this year. It may seem like a bit of sour grapes, but our team is a good 4.5 team made up of guys all belonging to our tennis club. How can we compete with an allstar team? Shouldn't there be some rules in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening. Ya ya I know it's just tennis, but I'm a bit PO'd.

 

[gplracer]

I live in Georgia and unfortunately it happens all the time. I saw guys at state playing 4.5 that played at large Division I schools only 3-5 years ago.

 

[Tim Tennis]

Unfortunately the USTA has let this thing get away from them and it is killing the participation. We used to have 5 to 6 teams play in the 50's 4.0. This year there were 2 teams. Next year there will only be 1 team and they will have to play somewhere else to qualify. It is too bad.

You got to love the game.

 

[Roforot]

Have you considered moving/pettitioning to move your team down to 4.0s? That way you'd only have to play 4.5s rather than 5.0.

 

[aahala]

I suggest trying to get Andre and A-rod to put on those glasses with fake noses and join your team.

 

[linli101]

I just don't understand why so much complains about playing with better players. Personally I would love to play with better players so I can learn something from them. I don't enjoy crushing players who are one or two levels below me.

 

[Brad Smith]

The situation is bad everywhere. Here in Gainesville, Florida we had a guy playing 4.5 this year who played on the University of Florida team last year and was in the 50's in the boy's 18's a few years ago. He's a 5.5 without question. So many 5.0's and 5.5's have been playing 4.5 that good 4.5's have been pushed down to 4.0, so that now if you're just an average 4.0 you're likely to be pushed down to 3.5, etc., etc.

The change to self-rating has caused a lot of this. There was certainly cheating in the past, but at least one or more raters had to be complicit in it and risk drawing too much attention to themselves. Now the player does the rating so there is no accountability. Since a lot of the self-raters are playing each other, there is no guarantee they will get bumped out to an appropriate level. It's not clear how all of this will work itself out and whether there will really be that many 5.0's and 5.5's (at least on the computer) competing in USTA.

The optimistic point of view is that the self-rating stuff will sort itself out in time since your rating lasts for five years instead of only one, and there is not an unlimited supply of ringers. The pessimistic point of view is that people will continue to use self-rating to form the most competitive teams and then hide their best players through the season to avoid getting them DQ'ed.

 

[Matt Shumway]

linli101. I'm all for playing better players, but this hand picking of players and sandbagging doesn't really accomplish that. As a matter of fact, it does the exact opposite. Because this allstar team has taken the best players from all the other teams in the league, those teams are now weak. Last year we had some really tough matches and it came down to the last match of the year for sectionals. This year, we have beaten every team with the exception of the allstar team 5-0 or 4-1. The allstar team beat us 4-1 and we were lucky to get that one match. I prefer having tough matches every week than non competetive matches all year except for the two matches against the allstar team.