This is an article focused on what I think to be the most mysterious tournament on the ITF Junior tour: the ITF Junior Masters, whose third edition was played in Chengdu (China) and ended today. This piece, though, is a bit peculiar, since it focuses on some lack of information which, in my view, has characterised the event; a following article focusing more on how the tournament progressed and, thus, on actual tennis, will be published soon.
The basic functioning of this tournament is easy to understand: it’s conceptually the same as the ATP/WTA finals: the 8 best players of the year are grouped to compete one against the other, so to establish once forever who is the king/queen of the relevant season. As in the named pro events, there is a round robin (whose composition’s criteria were not entirely clear to me, as I will clarify in my following piece), followed by direct elimination matches. There is also a “Road to Chengdu”, in order to establish the players entitled to compete in the Master.
Though, there are also some differences between the Junior Masters and the Pro Masters. First of all, the tournament this year has been moved from April to October: thus, the qualification period for the 2017 competition ran from 12 September 2016 until 10 September 2017. As a consequence, the ranking referred to establish the eight participant is not the usual Junior’s, but a dedicated one. As a matter of example, Claire Liu ranked n. 1 in the 2017 “Road to Chengdu”, but is number 2 in the Junior Ranking. I guess this serves the purpose to take into account for each year’s Junior Master, the Mexican Grade A and the Orange Bowl, which take place after the Master is actually played. Ok, all the above raises no issue and so far so good: everything is explained clearly on the ITF website. As a further information immediately available, one can find out that this event provides for a “pricemoney”, which is paid in travel grants: a great idea.
The above is basically all the information I was able to find of the Junior Master in the relevant section of the ITF website: no more on how the event worked was or is made available. By contrast with the little information available on the official website, the ITF spread around on Facebook tonnes videos and other material, including a video on the day the players spent visiting the giant pandas (come on, just give me a break…) or attending a conference focused, it seems, on something related to self-motivational skills (ouch…). Many videos on hot points, interviews etc. were also released.
Though at a point, I found one material info, which didn’t appear on the ITF website, but on an article issued by the same ITF: it was claimed that “This year’s event has been fully incorporated into the 18-and-under ITF Junior Circuit and will offer junior world ranking points for the first time to help determine the year-end No. 1 ranking”. This roused my interest: how the masters will affect the Junior rankings? And, in particular: how many points does the Junior Masters attribute? Having found no answers in easy to access spots of the ITF website, I went through the ITF 2017 junior circuit regulation: all I could find is that the Masters award the same bonus points as the Italian Open and Orange Bowl do. It is worth mentioning that this info, appearing on the 2017 regulations, is not even written in the ranking section of the ITF website. Even if I spent 20 minutes in researching, I could not find anything more. At this stage, the following questions came to my mind: since this event attributes bonus points as a Grade A, is the Junior Master an actual Grade A? Do the points awarded by the Masters count as 7th best result of a player or they can only substitute one of the six results normally taken in account to determine the Junior rankings?
Below the answers I offered myself to these questions, by relying only on the overall circuit rules I know and not on explicit ones I found in the 2017 regulations or on the ITF website. So, all that follows might be wrong (though, I would not blame myself for that).
As per the first question, I do not think the Junior Masters qualifies a Grade A since, first of all, it is not mentioned in the Grade A section of the ITF website and, on the “overview” section of the torunament, it is defined to be a grade “Junior Master”, a cathegory which, though, is not reflected in the ITF regulation; further, to be a Grade A, the Junior Master should derogate to the rule that a Grade A shall enrol at least 64 players: though, I found no express derogation to the above-mentioned rule for this tournament, which enrols only 8 players. As a consequence, in my view, the Junior Master does not qualify as a Grade A and, thus, attributes only as many bonus points as the Italian Open and Orange Bowl do (but it does not attribute the “regular” points attributed by such former events). Honestly, from what i read, I have the impression that the Junior Masters is a “gradeless torunament”.
As per the second question, as above, I tend to exclude that the result a player achieves in the Master can be considered as a 7th result to be taken in account to determine the Junior Ranking, since I did not find an express derogation to the rule that the Junior Rankings are calculated taking into account the six best results a player obtains during the year. If this is true, considering that the maximum bonus points attributed by the Master should amount to 62.5, in practical terms the event would be of little use in determining the Junior Rankings, since basically it would benefit only players who show a 0, or anyway a very a poor score, within the six best results achieved during the relevant season.
Further obscure matters: pursuant to the 2017 ITF Junior Regulation, the Master should attribute bonus points for both singles and doubles events: nevertheless, no doubles event actually took place; more, as per the players who did not qualify in the first two spots of the round-robin, and consequently played each other to determine the positions in the tournament from 4th to 8th (this is another difference between the Junior Masters and the Pro one), do they obtain as many bonus points as if they were quarterfinalist in Italian Open/Orange Bowl, regardless if they ended up in 8th or 5th position? I would assume yes, but also this matter is not explicitly clarified.
The new rankings which will be shown next week will help me to find the answers to the above queries; though, I would expect the ITF to be a bit less sloppy in providing this kind of information, since I find them to be quite material: honestly, I was surprised about all this obscurity on the rules governing the event: usually the ITF website is so clear and user friendly on such kind of topics!
I would be happy to be confuted by anyone who was able to find further information on the Junior Masters and proves me wrong on all or some of the issues I raised above.
