Today is Tuesday, it's 5:30pm and I see this on the tournament website.

Doubles Draws All doubles draws are down until Wednesday noon. Please check back after noon for any changes.

They took down the doubles draws - presumably (hopefully) to remake them based on something that makes sense.  I guess I should feel some small sense of victory, but I guess I will withhold judgement until I see the new draws.  I am going to assume that someone at a high enough level saw the lunacy of what they had and decided in the best interest of the integrity of the organization, decided to fix it.  At least I can only hope for that.

I hope they do fix it, don't get me wrong.  But some part of me feels like even if they did, there would be unfinished business.  Why did it require an ordinary person to complain two levels above the tournament director, only to be rebuffed twice, having to write this blog and attempting to spread it as far as I could to enact change for something that was clearly wrong?  Something is broken in the process.

I learned some information today about how draws are made, and I thought I'd share that with you here.  I was fairly ignorant to what a director goes through when making the draws.  I assumed you selected all the players in the tournament, clicked on a button, the computer would pick the seeds and randomly place the unseeded players, and voila - you'd be done.  Nope - not quite that simple.

First of all, the director has the ability to "Auto Seed" or "Manual Seed."  To me, the ability to manually seed players seems inherently bad.  I won't pretend I understand all the reasons why that's necessary, but I'll ignore that for the moment because the people I talked to regarding this tournament told me the director used "Auto Seed."  Auto Seed to me seems pretty straight forward - automatically generate the seeds.  Again, not quite that simple.

The seeding done by the "Tournament Data Manager (TDM)" (the software used to create a tournament and the draws), pops up a window when a tournament director hits the "Auto Seed" button.  The Auto Seed pop up window contains an entry called "Rank List Type."  This Rank List Type allows the director to specify what basis they want to use as the method for seeding.  There are a bazillion choices here, I am guessing that section ranking, national ranking, and grandmother's shoe size are all valid choices.

In the interest of full disclosure and transparency, I asked the tournament director what "Rank List Type" they used to create the Boys 12s doubles draw for this tournament, because I would like to see what possible ranking scheme would have not had my son and his partner seeded.  I have not heard back yet.  It seems like most of the e-mail exchanges I've had with the USTA officials have been polite while extolling the virtues of transparency and openness.  Yet, every time I ask for specific details regarding how things are done, I get the silent treatment.  It's frustrating.

I hope someone from the USTA is reading this because I want to speak to you directly here.  I'm one of the good guys.  Go look in your complaint department, I'm willing to bet money that you won't find a single complaint about me or my two kids who play competitive junior tennis.  That is incredibly unusual for someone with two kids competing at the highest level.

I'm on the front lines here.  I'm the one waking up at 4am to prepare to drive from San Diego to LA for an 8am match.  I'm the one whose driving 12 hours round trip to Tucson over Thanksgiving and New Years.  I'm the one whose spending ungodly amounts of money and time supporting my kids tennis addiction.  I'm that guy.  And I'm not asking for a lot in return.  I don't want special treatment, I don't want things I don't deserve.  I just want to be treated fair, and when I don't think I'm being treated fair, and I present a reasonable argument, I want someone to look into it.  The dismissive attitude of the people involved is hurting the sport.  The attitude has become one of putting up barriers hoping problems go away instead of deciphering which are the fake problems that can be ignored and which are the real problems which should be addressed.  We're all in this together, put aside your egos and hurt feelings, and let's build champions!