Good Afternoon Coaches,
I hope your seasons are going well and maybe soon this pollen will be gone! I wanted to ask a question and make a couple comments about the NCHSAA RPI that had been up and running until last week.
I thought it was pretty neat how the RPI showed the statewide rankings in each classification and what each team was ranked no matter their location. I told Caitlin I really wish the NCHSAA would do two separate RPI rankings, one for the entire state for each clssification and another one that splits it up into east and west for the dual team tennis state playoffs. I am sure that is something they can do but I am not sure they really want to do that. What do you think? Do you think it would be useful to see an RPI ranking for the entire state as the season begins and progresses? Or are you good with only showing the RPI for the east and west separately?
And does anyone trust the UTR ratings to be more accurate than you use to? I know some players UTR's are very accurate and some are very inaccurate. Are there any plans in the future to base lineup protests on some sort of actual metrics rather than some coaches eye test, or some expert parents opinion, or a coaches decision for one reason or another? This is my 28th year as a tennis professional, 8th year as a high school coach, have playerd high school, played college, and played professional tournaments back in my younger days! And it is pretty simple to manipulate the UTR if you know where to place your players and if they don't play tennis tournaments all the time. Lets say I put my #3 player at #6 and keep him or her there all season and she goes undefeated. His or her UTR will not be that high because they would be beating mostly UTR 1's and UTR 2's all season. I have heard this being talked about by several coaches and I just wish there was a good way to measure this not by what random coaches, parents, or players think but actual accurate metrics!
Coach Jay James
Player Ratings
As for player ratings and stacking, both UTR and WTN have two components: the player's rating, and the statistical confidence or reliability of that rating.The use of WTN is envisioned as part of the USTA High School Digital Platform. However, using it set lineups in the regular season is problematic, at least right now, because so many players have WTNs with very low reliability. It takes half a season, at least, to get the confidence level up for a player with no previous tennis experience.
More realistic would be the use of WTN to help with seeding at regional and state tournaments, and to set lineups in the dual-team tournament. In both cases, though, the issue of varying reliability remains a thorny one.
All of this is several years out. For the present, UTR can be used, along with player records, to make a stacking claim, but it's still going to have to be adjudicated by a human being for the foreseeable future.
RPI Update
I can't comment on the thinking at MaxPreps HQ.What I do know is that the RPI feed is currently down, and the "coding" that's being done is to display East and West in each classification. This is odd, since it worked properly, separating East from West in each class last fall.
As for me, I'm fine with East and West being separate, as all I'm really interested in is whether my team will make the playoffs, and if so, what our seeding would be.
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