Southern Closed Seeding: USTA vs UTR

Yesterday, the player selections and seedings were posted for our upcoming sectional closed tournament (the tournament starts this Saturday). Given that USTA is starting to incorporate Universal Tennis Ratings (UTR) in its selection and seeding process for several events this year, I thought I would take a look to see how things would flesh out when I compared the actual seeds using USTA rankings versus what the seeding would look like using UTR instead.

You may not think this makes much of a difference, but it does. For our sectional closed, the tournament uses “block seeding” which means that seeds get two “byes”. For a tournament with a 160 draw that is played over 6 or 7 days in the summer heat and humidity, getting 2 “byes” is a very big deal – that’s 2 fewer matches that the seeds have to play on their way to the title. It’s very rare for a non-seeded player to break through at this tournament because of that exact factor.

I will leave it to my readers to analyze this data and comment on its meaning and potential impact.

Here’s what I found in the various age groups:

Boys 18s

Girls 18s

Boys 16s

Girls 16s

Boys 14s

Girls 14s