Secrets of Junior ITF Rankings

Whilst we are waiting for the 2017 tennis season to begin and for new young players to show what they’ve got, here are a few lines on how the ranking system of Junior ITF tour works, so that anyone will be able to go through their own calculations and to predict in advance the new ranking of their favourite player.

This is nothing secret, everything is well explained on the Junior ITF website. Anyhow I hope this little resume can be useful, at least to some readers.

Junior ITF, unlike WTA and ATP, utilises a combined ranking system, in order to encourage players, as it is claimed on the ITF website, to play doubles “at junior level and subsequently at professional level”.

Let’s start by evidencing that, as a general rule, to calculate the ranking of a player, the best six results achieved by the same both in singles and doubles during a year are taken into account. Of course whenever a player obtains a result which is better than one of the six taken into account to calculate his/her previous ranking, the worse accounted result is substituted by the new (and better) one.

Similarly to WTA and ATP, the reference year to calculate the ranking of a player is not the calendar year, but is accounted starting from the relevant tournament: e.g., at the end of Roland Garros, the points gained by a player in the previous edition of the French Open vanish and are substituted by the new result (or, by a result obtained by the relevant player in a tournament played in the same week, if any). Thus, at the beginning of each season a defined ranking is already available: players who in the previous year competed on ITF tour will not start from 0, as it happens for instance in football, where all teams start the season from scratch.

What does then “combined ranking” mean? This expression can be defined as a ranking obtained by summing the points gained in singles tournaments to the points obtained in doubles. Though, points attributed to singles and doubles are differently pondered, meaning that in order to calculate the combined ranking of a player, the points attributed to singles are divided by 1, whilst points gained by such player in doubles are divided by 4. Thus, results achieved in singles weigh (much) more than those achieved in doubles.

Points are attributed on the basis of the importance of the relevant event, as it happens with WTA and ATP events. Junior ITF tour divides the events in grade A Events, which are the most important, followed by Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3, Grade 4 and Grade 5 Events. Actually, also Grade B (Regional Championships) and Grade C (International Team Competitions) exist. A Grade C Event counts a bit less than a Grade 2, in terms of points attributed. Grade B are further subdivided in B1, B2 and B3; Grade B and Grade C events are fewer than the events falling in other categories: nevertheless, please note that the Grade B1 Events attribute many points, more than Grades 1 do, but a bit less than Grades A do.

In order to get a clearer picture of the above, please refer, for exemplification purposes, to the grid below, which shows the points attributed to single tournaments with respect to Events of each Grade (this grid is copied and pasted from the Junior ITF website – at the top reference is made to Events belonging to the different grades: Grade A, Grade 1, Grade 2, etc. – Please note that Grade C are missing since a dedicated grid is used for them):

Singles

Attribution of points with respect to doubles tournaments works similarly to the above; though doubles tournaments held in the context of an Event attribute fewer points than the relevant singles tournaments (further, as stated above, ponderation also penalises results obtained in doubles).

Lastly, in order to have a full picture of the ranking system, one must take into account that Grade A Events weigh differently due to the fact that some of them award players bonus points (both for singles and doubles). For instance, in addition to the figures shown above, Grand Slam events attribute, as bonus points, 125 point to the winner, 90 to the runner-up and so on. Also the Italian Open, the Olympic Games and the Orange Bowl attribute bonus points (half of those attributed by Grand Slams), whilst the other Grade A events (Porto Alegre, Osaka and Mexico Open) do not attribute any bonus point. Thus, Grand Slams are the most important Grade A Events, followed by the Italian Open, Olympic Games and Orange Bowl, and then by the other Grade A Events.

Basically the above are the general principles governing the Junior ITF Ranking system: further details and other relevant information can be found on the junior ITF website.

A couple of final considerations: I personally think that the Junior ITF ranking system is really straightforward and easy to understand; further, the combined ranking seems indeed to achieve its aim to boost doubles: this is evidenced by the fact that, unlike what happens on the Pro tours, junior top players most often play both the singles and the doubles tournament of an Event: at the end of the season points attributed by doubles (even if pondered) can become indeed material. I would like the combined ranking system to be adopted also on WTA and ATP tours, actually.

Nevertheless in my opinion the ITF Junior ranking system suffers from a major flaw. It happens at junior level that the strongest players aging 17, or sometimes even 16 (and in case of Potapova, 15), play less on the Junior tour in order to focus on the Pro tour. This leads to the possible following scenario: as I wrote in a previous article, Potapova has declared that she will no more play on the Junior ITF tour. Let’s imagine that, for some reason, she changes her mind and decides to play the US Open as her first event on Junior ITF: at that stage she would have lost many of the points gained in 2016 (not having played any junior event in 2017, until the US Open) and she would rank around 20 on Junior ITF tour. She would then possibly play in the US Open as an unseeded or low seeded player and that would be unfair to her and, even more, to her opponents. Something similar to the above happened in 2016 year with respect to Katie Swan: during last season Katie basically played only the 4 slams and the Italian Open: as a consequence, notwithstanding that she ended 2015 in 2^nd spot of Junior ITF ranking, she played most of the majors in 2016 as unseeded player (ok, she played quite bad throughout all the season, but that’s not the point). I think it should be considered inserting a rule, valid only for the completion of the draws of the tournaments, whereby if a player has played less than a certain number of tournaments during a certain time lapse, the last available junior ranking of the previous season or his/her current pro ranking would be then somehow taken in account. Going back to our example, I do not think that number 5 Junior ITF would be real happy to find herself playing in the first round of the US Open against cute Potapova, ranking relatively low on Junior ITF but (maybe), at the same time, within the best 250 on WTA… But life sometimes is hard and the world is not a perfect place where to live.

Tennisunderworld takes the occasion to wish a great 2017 to everybody.

Tommy Hemp