Sectionals players who won a line moved up 3.6 times as often as those who lost every line
From 2022 to 2025 in Marin and San Francisco, 21.3% of 1,710 players who won a line at sectionals moved up the next year. Of the 750 who lost every line, 6.0% moved up, about the same as the 6.6% whose teams never qualified.
A move up here means a published NTRP rating at least one level higher the next year, which is USTA's decision rather than the Desk's. These are past seasons, not a forecast for any one player.
Who moved up after sectionals
Are qualifiers just better players?
The complaint is that sectionals collects good players. It's a fair point. Qualifiers do win more: around two-thirds of their regular-season lines, against a bit under half for everyone else. But team strength cannot explain the gap between winners and losers at sectionals, because all 2,460 players in it qualified.
It holds at every level
The winners moved up more often at every level, which matters because players move up less often the higher they start. Each player is grouped by Desk level, the Desk's estimate of their play, at their first line of the season. No sectional result could have moved it.
None of these figures shows that USTA counts a sectional match for more than a regular-season match. Players who win there may have been better than their records showed, and the data cannot tell the two apart.
It held every season
Between 18.3% and 25.0% of the winners moved up in every season, so no single year carries the result.
- 2022 season, rated in 2023: 19.3%
- 2023 season, rated in 2024: 18.3%
- 2024 season, rated in 2025: 25.0%
- 2025 season, rated in 2026: 21.6%
Read next: What happens after a bump?
All Tennis Desk Research·Browse every league the Desk holds, by year and area
How this was measured
Scope. USTA NorCal adult league in Marin County and San Francisco, from the 2022 to the 2025 season, each followed into the next year's published rating. It covers those two areas only, not NorCal or the country.
Who is counted. Each count is one player's season, so a player who reached sectionals twice counts twice. A season counts only if the player held a published NTRP rating in both years, because a move up cannot be seen otherwise. The player also had to play at least six regular-season lines, since a rate over two or three lines is mostly about who those opponents happened to be. In all, 7,362 player-seasons pass both tests.
What "sectionals" means here. A sectional line is one played on a day the published results mark as sectional. Playoff days are not sectionals here. Their lines do not count toward the six regular-season lines either.
Method. Every figure above was produced by the SQL recorded in docs/research/records/sectionals.json and re-run against the live database on October 6, before this page was built. Other explanations that could not be ruled out are in the record. So is a logistic regression that adjusts for level, regular-season wins and the number of lines played. Reproduce with npx tsx scripts/measure-research-record.ts.