Last Wednesday, I wrote about the pitfalls of the USTA self-rating system and how high school tennis experience, as specified in the guidelines, doesn’t always translate neatly into NTRP classifications. This week, I want to expand on that theme and focus on a group of players who are even more disadvantaged by the current structure of that advice. The USTA’s NTRP rating guidance doesn’t provide much help for adults who didn’t grow up playing tennis in the United States.
For international players new to the US, the NTRP self-rating process probably feels like trying to solve a puzzle without the picture on the box. The current USTA’s General and Experienced Player Guidelines document contains numerous references to American-specific playing experiences. That includes USTA Junior rankings, varsity high school tennis, and NCAA college play. For players who didn’t grow up under the USTA’s purview, those points of comparison are meaningless. Players who spent their teens and twenties honing their skills elsewhere frequently have no frame of reference for these categories.
There’s no guidance for how different global competitive structures map onto the NTRP divisions. While I am not familiar with leveled playing systems in other countries, it might be possible to develop specific guidance that bridges that gap. Lacking that, established USTA players must understand that foreign players reasonably have no idea where they should be classified when performing their self-rating. The lack of clarity creates anxiety and opens the door for both accidental sandbagging and intentional under-rating shenanigans.
In the absence of clear, internationally relevant guidance, new players frequently rely on the advice of experienced USTA captains or players during the self-rating process. Unfortunately, that perspective is often anything but neutral. When a player is being actively recruited to a team, there’s an inherent bias in any advice they receive. The prospective team has a vested interest in assigning any player the lowest rating that can be justified, which can lead to questionable classifications and a distorted competitive field. In practice, it means that other players often play the most significant role in determining where someone starts in USTA competition.
The seemingly straightforward criteria in the General and Experienced Player Guidelines break down when viewed through an international lens. Specifically, there is a lot of guidance surrounding previous junior or collegiate experience:
- “Played juniors and had a national ranking” — There will be a huge disparity between larger tennis-playing countries and smaller ones without a strong tennis culture. It also discounts individual variance within these systems.
- “Played college tennis” — While this works somewhat well for foreign players who came to the United States to play tennis in college, it provides no guidance for players who did not.
The result is a system that frequently misclassifies people, which is a shame. Incoming international players should be a welcome and exciting addition to local tennis communities. However, instead of helping them integrate into competitive play, the current system presents a bewildering, culturally biased entry point. Worse, initial self-ratings that turn out to be inaccurate can create a lot of resentment and drama. As tennis continues to grow, we must find a more seamless way to integrate non-US adult players into the USTA NTRP system.
The solution isn’t simple, but it starts with acknowledging that not all tennis journeys follow the same developmental script. A self-rating system that ignores foreign players may have made sense when the General and Experienced Player Guidelines were first developed. However, globalization has changed the world we live in, and it is time to consider how to better welcome other people into the NTRP-leveled competitive framework.
- General & Experienced Player Guidelines, USTA-hosted guideline, no version information, marked as Updated February 2019.
