As the number two seed, they beat the number one seed 8-2 in the finals. The top two seeds met in the finals, so in terms of seeding, I feel vindicated.
It is interesting to note that in terms of seeds keeping their seeds, there was only one upset with the corrected seeding - and that was in the finals. With the original seeding, the #1 seed lost to the #2 seed, the #2 seed lost to an unseeded team, the #3 seed lost to an unseeded team, and the #4 seed lost to an unseeded team. So obviously, the original seeding was pretty far out of whack. It's amazing to me that auto generated rankings lists can be so far different.
One of the problems with UTR is that they don't have a UTR for doubles (although I'm told by Trevor that they are diligently working on this). Instead, a lot of doubles seedings are done by a combination of singles ranking -- which seems pretty bad to me (I guess in the absence of anything else, like a dartboard) this is probably the best you can do. I think doubles is a very different game, and there are plenty of cases where kids can be great doubles players and lousy singles players, and vice versa.
One of the higher ups at the SCTA told me basically that seeding is very contentious and that you should be prepared to beat everyone, so seeding is unnecessary. Which seems completely ludicrous to me. Tournaments are like little wars of attrition. Each match wears on you. The cumulative effects of matches start to add up as the tournament goes on. If you only had to play one person a week, giving you sufficient rest in between. Then yeah, if your only intent is to win the entire tournament, then maybe seeding wouldn't be necessary. But that's not how these tournaments run. You can have two, three, even four matches a day (two doubles and two singles). And then consecutive days of matches. With this many matches, kids get tired, and the strength of your consecutive opponents can play a big role in your success! If you've had success in tournaments, and you've earned the right to be a seed - you deserve the (statistically speaking) easier matches.
That's it for today. I left the tournament today after Zack and his partner won the finals in doubles, and Zack getting wiped out in singles. I got back to San Diego around 4pm, went to a friends house to watch the last half of the Super Bowl, got home, helped my daughter for an hour and a half with calculus, and now I'm writing this -- I'm exhausted. Good night!
