As I mentioned in my previous post, the folks at Universal Tennis Ratings did some extensive pre- and post-event analysis of this year’s Boys and Girls 16s and 18s Winter Nationals draws and outcomes (click here for their online work).
In addition to the numbers, UTR co-creator Dave Howell provided the following in-depth analysis:
Upsets abound . . . or maybe not so much!
Scrutinizing the main draw of the Winter Nationals B18s, you can find 17 matches which went against the seedings. Seems like a lot, but on closer inspection only 5 of those matches were contested by players whose ratings (UTR) were farther apart than 1.0. And even among those, some were mere hundredths of a point outside the 1.0 UTR standard. It’s fun to look for these things, but is there anything to be ascertained from all this that can lead to improving player experience? What are your thoughts?
One more thought . . . about 1/3 of main draw matches were played by opponents whose ratings were farther than 1.0 apart. Another way of putting that is 2/3 of match opponents were within 1.0 of one another. That sounds pretty good.
The upset trend continues in G18s, but not really.
Again, if you look strictly at lower seeds and unseeded players knocking off higher seeds, you come away thinking there are a high number of upsets, 16. But the UTR summary only found one upset. Which means over 98% of the time the higher-rated player won when the match-up showed players to be more than 1.0 UTR apart.
Another look at total matches inside vs. outside 1.0 shows almost half the matches (48%) were outside 1.0. This indicates a pretty wide range of levels for this event. On top of that 61% of those matches outside 1.0 were Decisive*.
Only 43% of matches inside 1.0 were Competitive*. We’d like to see better than 50%, but this percentage is almost 3 times better than competitive matches outside 1.0, 15.25%. I’m pretty sure these players can do better.
*Competitive, Routine, and Decisive Matches: A match is considered Competitive when the losing player wins more than 50% of the minimum number of games needed to win the match. Similarly, a match is considered Routine if the losing player is only able to win between 34% and 50% of the minimum number of games needed to win the match. Lastly, a match is considered Decisive if the losing player is only able to win less than 1/3 of the minimum number of games needed to win the match.
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