Tennis Team Starts Play Friday

[untbowler]

Tennis Team got the #2 Seed behind FIU and ahead of #3 Denver and #4 Troy.

They will play the winner of MTSU/UALR, which will be a close match, but UNT hammered MTSU about a week ago in Murfreesboro and UALR is a good team but lacks in area, after having officiated several of their matches over the previous 3 years. UALR has a very good #1 who is a freshman and has depth but should not pose an issues if they can beat MTSU.

SunBeltSports Central

Interesting on the seeds, ULM should be the #7, not #5, having lost to MTSU and barely beat UALR and Arkansas State. The UALR was protested as well. ULL should be #5 and MTSU #6. USA is seeded low but they have had a short-handed team all year. WKU is just a joke. Sad to see UNO so low as they had some very good team earlier in the 2000's.

Edited April 21, 2010 by untbowler

[untbowler]

MUTS defeat UALR 4-0

The ladies will be playing MTSU Friday Morning, should be quick and efficient for the ladies as they then prepare for winner of Denver/ULL

[CMJ]

And Bowler was right. We won fairly easily.

http://www.sunbeltsports.org//pdf8/689097.pdf

[Mean Green Matt]

Our Opponent will be ULL. They defeat Denver 4-3.

Sun Belt Website

Edited April 23, 2010 by Mean Green Matt

[CMJ]

Wow, that's a pretty big upset I would think. Denver won the title last year didn't they?

[GrandGreen]

As an aside, does anyone know how the scoring of matches evolved. It seems to me, strange that 3 double matches only count one point. Also that a number one seed is no more important in scoring than a six. What keeps teams from playing their best players lower in the seeding to greatly improve their probability of winning?

[CMJ]

As an aside, does anyone know how the scoring of matches evolved. It seems to me, strange that 3 double matches only count one point. Also that a number one seed is no more important in scoring than a six. What keeps teams from playing their best players lower in the seeding to greatly improve their probability of winning?

Not sure why doubles only counts as one. I played tennis in HS, and I am pretty sure all the doubles matches counted equally.

As far as the singles goes, you are testing the depth of the team, so it makes sense that the 1's are no more important that then 6's. As to your question to why there isn't "sandgagging" - if you played your stronger kids in the 6/5/4 spots -- theoretically it wouldn't give you an advantage because likewise your weaker kids would go against their stronger ones - so it'd be a wash.

Edited April 23, 2010 by CMJ

[GrandGreen]

Not sure why doubles only counts as one. I played tennis in HS, and I am pretty sure all the doubles matches counted equally.

As far as the singles goes, you are testing the depth of the team, so it makes sense that the 1's are no more important that then 6's. As to your question to why there isn't "sandgagging" - if you played your stronger kids in the 6/5/4 spots -- theoretically it wouldn't give you an advantage because likewise your weaker kids would go against their stronger ones - so it'd be a wash.

Thanks, but it would not be a wash if your best kids could not beat the opponents top players but could beat out the lower ranked players. For example your team playing straight could not win any match, but playing your 1, 2, 3 against their 3, 5, and 6 should result in three wins; therefore you would tie in the singles matches despite having a team that should have lost 0 - 6. I am sure there is a honor code involved and in the long run this would be easy to detect, but it does look like it might be easy to slide maybe your number 2 player to a 3 to get more favorable odds. I just wonder if there is some type of protocol or testing that polices this to some degree.

[CMJ]

Kids playing a spot or two out would be tough to determine. Well, it would be if it is anything like it was in HS. We had "challenge" days about every 2 weeks(sometimes every week) where the odd kids could challenge the even kids and vice versa, and then switch the next go round.

For instance one week the evens could challenge the offs. So the 6 could play the 5, the 4 play the 3 and the 2 play 1. The winner had that spot. Then a week or two later the odds challenged evens(that week the 1 and 6 would just hit as the others dueled it out).

I'm guessing this was done so it would test us to see who was really match tough. Kids rarely moved more than a position up or down(I did once move up from 6 to 3, but eventually settled back to 5, which is where I usually was). But because of that it could be tough to check.

As an aside, those were the best days, because we actually played instead of just drills.

Edited April 23, 2010 by CMJ

[untbowler]

The ITA has fairly strict rules in place that say you must play players in order of strength and once line-up is established you can only shift the player 1 spot up or down. A match can be protested if line-ups are stacked. I know for certain ULM has been protested at least twice this year. Syracuse was protested by EMU and their 4-3 win was flipped to a 4-3 loss.

Most coaches know the teams they are playing and keep quite the eye on any shenanigans.

As for Denver they are down this year with injuries, having to throw in a walk-on at #6. Overall a down year for Sun Belt with Denver and USA much weaker than normal.

[GrandGreen]

The ITA has fairly strict rules in place that say you must play players in order of strength and once line-up is established you can only shift the player 1 spot up or down. A match can be protested if line-ups are stacked. I know for certain ULM has been protested at least twice this year. Syracuse was protested by EMU and their 4-3 win was flipped to a 4-3 loss.

Most coaches know the teams they are playing and keep quite the eye on any shenanigans.

As for Denver they are down this year with injuries, having to throw in a walk-on at #6. Overall a down year for Sun Belt with Denver and USA much weaker than normal.

Thanks for the explanation.

[CMJ]

NT moves to the finals!

http://www.sunbeltsports.org//pdf8/689519.pdf