As a result of which I only just saw this, and so duplicated the Tara talk in the Phuket thread 

It did raise a wry smile from me though

Next Monday marks the 5th anniverary of the first of the women's tables. I tweeted a link to that first table (2008 week 25) yesterday evening and it was more than twice as popular as the new (2013 week 25) table so I thought I'd paste it here too in case anyone didn't catch it on Twitter and wants to have a look:

http://bit.ly/ZPO5po

The highest-ranked players back then who no longer have singles rankings now were Naomi Cavaday, GB no. 5 and Sarah Borwell, GB (singles) no. 6. Jade Windley was just joining the GB top 25 for the first time, Tara Moore had just rejoined and Laura, Heather, Johanna, Samantha and Lisa (to name just a few) were nowhere to be seen!

The men's table has been going for even longer on this site (i.e. since the start of 2008) and a couple of years longer than that elsewhere, first on the Rusedski forum, and then on BladeTiger's Dave Sherwood and Jonny Marray sites (the latter is one that closed down a few years too early! LOL), but before the start of 2008 I just rolled the same table forward all the time so sadly there are no 'back copies' to reminisce with!

-- Edited by steven on Saturday 15th of June 2013 06:52:48 AM

No less than 10 new WTAs singles career highs for Brits today ... and 12 in doubles too! At the top end, Winnipeg 25K & Vancouver 100K going on together help, while at the other end, less events than last year helps.

JoKo jumps 32 places to 115

Samantha enters the top 200, up 24 to 189 ... and gets a new doubles career high of 163 too

Also getting two new career highs - Tara, up 4 to 185 in singles and 207 in doubles, and Jade, up 30 to 304 in singles and 226 in doubles

Dasha jumps 40 places to 713 in singles, Eden Silva hits a new career high 1129 and most of last week's new entrants move up to new CHs too

In doubles, Emily moves up from top 200 (my definition) to top 200 (Tara-style), up 15 at 185, Lucy makes the top 400 at 400, Jess Ren gets her first new doubles CH this year at 705, again last week's new entrants move up and Jazzamay Drew & Kathryn Hughes both join the rankings

However, we have 'lost' a player in the WTA top 500, since Anne appears to have asked to be taken off the rankings with immediate effect!

I see Laura ended the season WR 46, the highest British women's season ending ranking since Anne Hobbs WR 42 in 1987. So in these terms the best year for 26 years.

Yes, only 3 places higher than Heather's WR 49 in 2012 and in many ways a disappointing season with so much more ( hopefully ! ) to come.

Still, just thought it worth noting.

Jon wrote:

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Would this be the right place to keep a list of GB high ranking changes (or shall I start a new thread?)

Anyway, this week:

18 November 2013
Jade Windley - 297 (was 300)
Katy Dunne - 703 (was 731)
Laura Deigman - 801 (was 811)
Freya Christie - 1109 (was UNR)

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It probably is but there are already weekly lists of new career highs on our site at http://www.britishtennis.net/stats/2013f.htm?n=1, so you might just want to highlight the most significant ones. It's up to you though, obviously.

It's good to see that we agree on this week's highs, anyway

With Bally retiring and apparently taking herself off the rankings, we now only have 10 players in the top 500.

In Steven's records going back to 1975, when there weren't even 500 ranked players in total, there has only been one year when we have ended the season ( originally year ) with less top 500 players, i.e. 9 in 2004.

At least Bally waited long enough so that we still had 11 at the end of the 2013 season, and I hope to see Anna Smith and Katy Dunne at the forefront of adding to this in 2014 ( and none of the existing 10 dropping out ! )

Who else ? Katie Boulter maybe ?

kundalini wrote:

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Player links to WTA profiles now redirect to WTA home page (change seemed to happen this afternoon)

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When the WTA downgraded their site (early this year, if I remember right), the one user-friendly thing they did was to leave a parallel version of the site up at http://origin-www.wtatennis.com - I've been using that ever since and it also meant that all the old links still worked, though assuming that the parallel site wouldn't last forever, I've made sure I've used the new links for any players who have joined the rankings for the first time since then, so they should still work for some players. 

The most essential thing for me about the 'origin' version of the site was that it made it easy to copy and paste in all the GB rankings that the stats page run off each week (the new version doesn't paste into Excel with columns separated in the same way), so I only noticed on Sunday that it had gone, hence it must have happened sometime last week as you suspected. As you have found, all the "origin" links now divert to the new style WTA home page.

I'll try to update all the links when I set up the 2014 sheets (it's not that easy because unlike with previous site changes, they haven't just changed the first few parts of each URL) and I will also set them up so that the links only have to be amended once for each player if they get changed again in future.

Grrrr  (at people who change URLs gratuitously without thinking that lots of other people might have linked to them)