I've heard that the ITF plan to scrap satellites completely from 2007 onwards so the lowest level will be futures.
What do you think about this ?
I think it's a good idea points-wise, I've always thought it was a bit tough on players having to defend all their points from 4 weeks of a satellite in one go the following year especially as some players who've done really well, have to defend 30+ points which is the equivalent of winning three 10k futures and losing all those points can see them drop at least 50 places in the rankings.
yeah its fine, after all you the country can just organise a few abck to back futures if it wants, and you would probably find most of the players will play in all anyway, you also miss out on the fact that a player may recieve a minor injury and wish to miss a futures week, but in a satelite have to drag himself into the matches to make the final, thowrs the 1st round, thus deprivingna fit player of a chnage, same could apply to a player who wins the 1st 3 legs but misses the final week and ends up with nothing.
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Count Zero - Creator of the Statistical Tennis Extrapolation & Verification ENtity or, as we like to call him, that steven.
Only problems, they probably do 10k futures, unless they already do. and what about the ranking points, lets say matt smith was still in the top 300 dues to his futures and satellites what would happen to the points, would they increase or let their ranking slide after wasting 4 weeks just gain points.
Count Zero wrote: yeah its fine, after all you the country can just organise a few abck to back futures if it wants, and you would probably find most of the players will play in all anyway, you also miss out on the fact that a player may recieve a minor injury and wish to miss a futures week, but in a satelite have to drag himself into the matches to make the final, thowrs the 1st round, thus deprivingna fit player of a chnage, same could apply to a player who wins the 1st 3 legs but misses the final week and ends up with nothing.
Yeah, that happened to Jamie Baker last year. By week 3 of the autumn satellite last November, he'd been playing for 10 weeks straight and had reached several finals and was burnt out. If it had been a futures he would have pulled out and conserved some energy for the next week but because it was a sat he had to play and ended up with a demoralising loss to some Italian ranked 800ish and then somehow reached the quarters in week 4 the following week, but had nothing left in the tank when he came up against Martin Lee.
If a player plays the 1st three weeks of a sat but then misses week 4 despite qualifying for it, does he not get any points ?
VSandhi20 wrote: Only problems, they probably do 10k futures, unless they already do. and what about the ranking points, lets say matt smith was still in the top 300 dues to his futures and satellites what would happen to the points, would they increase or let their ranking slide after wasting 4 weeks just gain points.
Most of the GB futures are 15ks now, the LTA cut down on the sats this year and put extra prize money into the futures. I think they'll just replace this year's GB 1 satellite with several 15Ks or maybe a couple of 25k challengers.