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The tennis coaches are responsible for creating and maintaining the ladder. Several factors are used to determine a player’s position on the ladder, including their past performance, practice results, match outcomes, challenge matches, and any other factors that might influence their ranking.
Challenge matches play a key role in determining a player’s ladder position. Any player may challenge another player by asking a coach for approval. If the coach believes both players have a fair chance of winning, they will approve the match.
Once approved, the challenger is responsible for organizing the match with the player they are challenging. After the match, the challenger must report the result, win or lose. Even a “quality” loss—such as a closely contested match—can impact ladder placement.
If the lower-ranked player wins a challenge, the coaches will decide how that affects the ladder standings.
Players cannot challenge someone in the last week of ladder adjustments unless they’ve already issued a challenge to that player earlier in the season. If a player refuses a challenge, the coaches may adjust the ladder rankings accordingly.
The challenge match is played like a regular tennis set of 6 games and a 2-game margin. If the score reaches 6-6, a tiebreaker is played. The tiebreaker is won by the first player to reach 7 points with at least a 2-point margin (e.g., 7-5 or 8-6, but not 7-6 or 8-7). Once the tiebreaker is settled, it counts as the 7th game of the set, so the final score would be recorded as 7-6 or 7-5, depending on the outcome.
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