Preseason rankings takeaways and NCAA favorites

So earlier this week, the ITA released their preseason singles, doubles, and newcomer rankings, and they are done differently, [laughs] so it's worth calling out.

So for singles, what they do is they take the top 125 from that final year-end ranking in May, and they remove all of the ineligible players.

Those are players who have graduated or exhausted their eligibility however they were granted, and then that becomes the top X number, so everyone gets moved up.

And so, for example, on the men's side, Will Manning of NC State was ranked number 125 to end the year.

They remove 48 players, he moves all the way up to 77.

After that, between 78 and 125, it is filled out in order of world tennis number, and that is where you can start to bring in the newcomers, so the, the new additions to college tennis.

It is purely ranked by their world tennis number.

So that is how the singles rankings work, and so in this case, Luca Preda, who is the number one newcomer, has the highest world tennis number of all of the returners and all of the newcomers who were not in that final 125.

So Will Manning at 77, Luca Preda at 78.

So that is how the singles rankings work, and so at the end of the season, you pretty much know exactly what the preseason rankings are going to be, one through X.

You just take out the players that you know are, are leaving.

That gets more difficult moving forward with all of the new eligibility and more years, but that's how it works.

On doubles, it is not done that way.

You have coaches, teams submit duos, submit pairs, and then those pairs are strictly ranked in order of their combined world tennis number.

So nothing from the presea- the previous season matters when it comes to your preseason doubles rankings.

And then the newcomer list is just the top 20 players by world tennis number that are new to college tennis, and schools have to submit them.

Sometimes schools forget, uh, but that is how your newcomer list is done.

And so Adam, before we get into the specifics of who is ranked where, what are your thoughts on how these preseason rankings are done?

I think in essence, I think the singles, they get it right.

I think the way that they do this is correct because in reality, you know, the people who finished the, the rankings last year, if they are coming back, I think deserve that ranking or something similar.

I, I know there's no tennis in between in the summer and a lot of things can happen, but I think it's fair that they get just bumped up based on who is still returning.

That's where it falls, and then the WTN from there on out for the newcomers I think is fair.

We don't know how these players are gonna play in college.

They come in, they can come in with some sort of number assigned to them, but really when we see them in college is how we're gonna be able to compare them to the rest of the field because, you know, most of these college players are playing pretty much anywhere between 75% or more of their matches of the entire year in college versus other college players and not out on the pro circuit against a various, uh, plethora of opponents.

So I think the singles, they get it right.