With the divisions Open to 16, we are looking to focus on the upper divisions mainly in an effort to win and compete. We are also considering utilizing the lower divisions with pickleball influencers, social media mini celebrities, relatives/friends/SOs of white whale Open/22 players we are looking to court to play for us.
One of the biggest hurdles we have found was getting players to commit to the tournament due to financial restrictions. Based on talking with the executive committee, we came up with a loose framework to utilize our budget by tournament/division
This is a rough estimate that comes out to a total of $8,600 per tournament. The executive committee approved a players' budget of 10K a tournament so that gives us roughly $1400 to play with. We can use this to try to entice Open/22 players or invest in the food/fun budget to create an experience that is bar none the best in the MiLP. We want people to want to play for the Snake Eyes, and our ability to create an unforgettable experience will contribute greatly to that mentality.
Roster Strategy Ideas Email Thread
NML Boys (Chris and Jeremy)
We wanted to provide some thoughts on building MiLP rosters. We’re putting our thoughts to only you for now but happy to forward our thoughts along to the group after. These are more long-term thoughts when we have more infrastructure in place as filling rosters is not going to be easy at the beginning probably. The concepts are mostly theoretical as we haven't implemented this much and haven't followed MiLP closely enough to know for sure what has been working so far.
From what we have gathered with DUPR, for the most part, one big flaw in the algorithm is the gender-less / age-less concepts. Other people have put these thoughts out there but it is very hard for an algorithm to have a universal rating when the current tournament setup is built around age and gender brackets. Until we have tournaments that are only categorized by DUPR skill level, it will be difficult for the algorithm to accurately determine skill levels across age and gender. What this means is that women and older players are often overrated according to DUPR. This is not always the case but it often seems to be the case with our anecdotal evidence.
Currently, we think the key to building an amateur MiLP team is having dominant men for the level This may not apply as much to the Open category, but anything else for 22, 20, 18, 16 and 14, the men can really dominate. We watched some of the Basic Dink (Syd Steinaker) and her MiLP team play last year. Her DUPR 18 team had two lower rated DUPR women and two guys who were basically legit 5.0 players, and those two 5.0 players just took over. The women held up fine enough and then the men were just better than what any other team had combined. Her team won the DUPR 18 again this past weekend in Tampa and from what we could see the team was constructed similarly - one guy was a carry over from the last event.
The crux of this is that you most likely don’t want your women being the players with higher DUPRs on your team because they don’t impact winning like the men can at the amateur level. This applies similarly to older players because the 50 year old with a 5.0 DUPR is not as good as the 25 year old with the same 5.0 DUPR usually. This could change but that seems to be the case right now.
In terms of finding value, unless you personally know how good someone is, you are not often finding value with higher rated women or older players. Obviously you always want to find people who are underrated on DUPR with both genders but that can be very hard to do. Our thought is that the biggest edge is finding underrated, lower rated women as it will allow you to maximize what your guys can do.
One other thing to consider on DUPR and this is only a theory of ours based on a small sample size, but it seems that the algorithm can be punishing to players who are lower to middle of the pack of a skill level in areas with a high density of very skilled players (ex. Florida). Conversely, the algorithm can be quite favorable to players who are at the top of the pack of a skill level in areas with a lower density of skilled players (ex. 5.0, non-pro women in the PNW and West Coast). Again, we have not done a deep dive on this. This is based on what we have monitored across amateur divisions when we are looking up players who we have either played against or have watched video of.
There will be lots of learning to come as to how best to structure these teams and we understand roster building for MiLP is not necessarily the most important aspect. However, we also think it is good for the group to have a general team building philosophy to follow if at all possible. At the same time. we don’t want to fall into group think either and if people have different ideas or theories, we are always open to those.
Niall Fitzgerald
Appreciate the insights & thoughts here.
So I haven’t spent a tonne of time up until now reviewing DUPR, I’m more familiar with UTR. I’m also very new to PB in general. (Any suggestions on channels to watch, blogs to read etc please let me know). My background is in Tennis - played college & coached college for few years.
From the PB I have watched, all of your anecdotal comments/theories make sense to me. Interestingly, we were just talking about this topic with one of the players who committed to play for us in the St. Louis event. He plays a lot of mixed with my sister, who is ‘decent’, but her DUPR is over-inflated because she has medaled (playing with an under-rated male) at most events in the 4.5 brackets.
What is interesting to me is understanding what level, style and qualities of the female (or weaker players) that can ‘hold up fine enough’ & where the tipping points are. Running the risk of setting Tim off, in my experience you can’t just recruit & set line-ups by the numbers (in this case DUPR). This is particularly true when there will be asymmetries in effort levels between Teams in terms of boots on ground, recruiting, research, analytics etc - I’m working on the assumption that our group will be top of the pile there.
Another challenge I was thinking about is teams becoming victims of our their own success. Ie. You get the 5.0 male & 4.0 female combo working & delivering good results, I would expect the female rating shoot up pretty quickly - so there would be constant shifting needed. Realize this is a theoretical far distant problem.
As a general comment, for now our ‘pipeline’ of female players is pretty light - so we are sort of shooting for anything we can get currently - however I am targeting ex-college tennis females who are solid athletes, but will have low DUPR.
As you noted the content below is more relevant for future state of Snake Eyes/MiLP - but I’m really looking forward to getting into this in detail over time.