UTR League Incentives

Tennis Sam

Rookie
I've been aware of UTR for a long time in the junior/college arena. Mostly the incentives there are for juniors to maximize their UTR so that they will get noticed by college coaches. There are all kinds of interesting things I've observed for kids doing to maximize their UTR. Some high level juniors won't play HS tennis because they do not want junk HS matches that they easily win to displace high level tournament matches they played over the summer. I've even seen some kids create new profiles when they sign up for a UTR event (all that's needed is a free email account) and if they do well they notify UTR to merge the new profile with their more established one. If they do bad, they hope no one will notice.

Adult leagues presents a whole set of different problems and incentives. Sandbagging is a real concern in adult leagues. For sandbaggers there is an incentive to minimize (instead of maximize) your rating. The interesting thing about UTR is that wins and losses don't even matter. It's just the game score. So you can actually win a match and reduce your rating by losing more games than a weaker opponent. You don't even need to lose more games, just make sure the match reaches the competitive threshold. For example, if you are inherently a UTR 5, it'd be easy to spot a UTR 3 player several games each set and still beat them. If you play a UTR 3 player competitively, you will just be a little better than them. This in my opinion seems like the easiest system to game if you are a sandbagger. What is UTR doing to make sure that this kind of thing doesn't happen?

Has anyone thought more about the incentives this system might create if it becomes more widely adopted in adult leagues?
 
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