Off The Screen Issue 5: Why are there 16 teams in CPTC Series 3?
It's a question even the players are asking. We have some answers.
On a recent Wednesday evening, light snow was falling at the Winter Club in Lake Forest, while two teams in very different leagues played.
The Series 36 team from Winnetka, which I captain, was one of them.
In terms of mileage, it was our longest road trip of the season, 15 miles of easy driving from our home club.
The other visiting team was just a little better and traveled from just a little farther away.
While a few of Hinsdale Golf Club’s Series 3 guys, like T.J. Sobczak and Kevin Gerow, took the train from the city, others trekked about 40 miles north (and east) in their cars. And as anyone knows, 40 miles in Chicago traffic during the winter can feel like an eternity.
But that’s the life they signed up for in their series, which stretches from Hinsdale to Lake Forest, from Glen Ellyn to Chicago proper.
As we left the club around 9:30 p.m., after finishing off our 10-3 win over Winter Club — along with some beers, steaks and mashed potatoes — Sobczak and his partner Ryan Keefe were still going at it with their opponents, each point an exercise in patience and skill.
Their three-set win over Brian Woodruff and Mike Milliman needed 34 games, not including the tiebreaker in the first set. It took about two hours.
Hey, if you’re going to travel to Lake Forest, might as well make it worth your time.
I was looking through the different series earlier this year on the APTA site when I noticed the standings for Series 3 looked odd.
I counted 16 teams. Could this be right? I knew that 10 was magic number for a series, but it didn’t always work out that way. The last two years, I’ve been in eight-team series. I know that others have 12 or even 14.
But 16?
“Honestly that's absurd,” said Lakeshore Sport and Fitness captain Luke Clarkson. “I’ve never heard of 16.”
“It's pretty wild,” Winnetka captain Stephen Larko said. “I've been doing this for a while now and I've never seen 16 teams in the series before.”
“Yeah, it's a lot,” Glen Ellyn captain Patrick Bouchard said. “I'm trying to think how many we had last year. We had at least 12 teams. Maybe 14.”
It’s actually tied for the biggest series in the CPTC this season, but while Series 27 SW also has 16, those teams are all located in the southwest suburbs.
Series 3 is like a college super conference spread out around Chicago and its suburbs. It’s the Big Ten of Chicagoland.
The sprawling series reminded me of something Xenon founder Noah Seidenberg said to me about the uniqueness of Chicago paddle.
“If you go out east, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut are absolutely enormous but they're all separate,” he said. “And so, Fairfield County in Connecticut is going to be its own entity, Westchester County, New York City, their own ones. And then there’s New Jersey. In Chicago, it’s one big league that encompasses everybody. You can get from New Jersey to Connecticut in an hour and a half. But in Chicago, that's like driving from Hawthorn Woods down to Midtown at 5 o’clock for a match.”
So how did Series 3 get this big? Most of the captains I talked to weren’t quite sure. But there was one guy who plays in the series who knew, because he was involved in its creation.
John Watrous plays for Evanston. He’s in his 18th season playing paddle in the Chicago area — he’s 5-2 this year with a 21.9 PTI — and his 10th in some kind of leadership role in local circles.
Around 2014, he took over the Illinois Married Mixed tournament and before you know it, he’s on several boards and helping refine the PTI rankings.
“I, along with four other guys, founded a trading firm,” he told me recently. "And one of the things that I always focused on was the modeling side of pricing and risk management. So I'm not a stranger to algorithms and things like that and it's a real appeal for me. I started asking questions of people and they pointed me in the direction of other people who started saying, 'What would you like to help out with this?’”
That’s how you get an unpaid second job. So how did he help create this super-series?
“I was working directly with Bill O'Brien on that,” he said. "Bill and Alan Graham had been doing the series placement for decades and Alan was stepping away from it and I was going to help out because I'm on the CPTC board. My focus is on the PTI stuff and leveraging PTI. So I was very much involved with all that. And we were trying to place teams for the first time taking PTIs into account as best we could.”
Leveraging PTI is critical to how series were formed this year. The rejiggered PTI formula — created in conjunction with the Volley team — played a much bigger role in forming series this year. But the human element is still important.
The first step to creating a series is the promotion and relegation of first-place and last-place teams from the previous year, using PTIs to determine how far they can move. Then the CPTC asks clubs for series requests, but now they want more than guesses.
“For the first time, we required them to submit information, their best guesses, as to what the rosters would be,” Watrous said.
The CPTC committee then looked through the requests — many of which have to due with the tangled logistics of each club’s schedules — and factored in the PTI formula.
“We had the approach that in any series we wanted the average PTI of the teams, any team in it, to be within three points of the average of the series,” Watrous said.
The combination of promotions, logistics, requests and PTI resulted in a 16-team Series 3.
For example …
“We had Glen View that had won Series 5 but they had an issue because they couldn't move to Series 4 because it's the same night as their Series 1 team,” Watrous said. "So they requested Series 3. Hinsdale Golf Club had a brand-new team that they were assembling that requested Series 3. Hawthorn Woods had a Series 5 team, but they had reasons that they wanted Series 3; Series 4 wasn't going to work for them. Ruth Lake was another one. They were Series 4 the previous year and had done really well. So they they wanted to move up.”
So that’s how 10 or 12 became 16. These teams fit in the PTI parameters and there wasn’t much room elsewhere.
“Series 2 already had 12,” Watrous said. “Series 4 had 12 as well. So if we moved anybody, it was just going to increase the numbers in those series.”
And some teams declined to move up.
“They had asked us to move to Series 2,” said Glen Ellyn’s Bouchard, who is also a pro at Medinah. “But, you know, I looked at PTIs and, my boss, Anthony (McPherson) was on Series 2, and he had a six PTI or something right around there (4.6 to start last season), and he was 0-9 last year in Series 2. So I'm like, if he was a (4.6) and our best guys coming into the season were like 12 and 13 … we politely declined to move up.”
As for the CPTC’s approval of the bloated series, the main issue, Watrous said, would be the playoffs. It wouldn’t be fair for half the series to miss it, so they figured the best fix would be two playoff tournaments, one for the top eight and one for the bottom.
When we talked the expanded playoff format hadn’t yet been announced — captains heard speculation about it all year — but Watrous said that’s the plan.
Last year, though, North Shore finished eighth and won the playoffs because enough of their talented players showed up. In a competitive series like this, guys aren’t just playing once a week to get a little exercise and drink a few beers. You have people playing for multiple clubs in different series, not to mention a tournament schedule, so while the team that wins the regular season might not be the best overall club, what can you do?
The regular season has to mean something. And right now, there is a pretty clear demarcation between the top eight and bottom eight in the series.
After the Dec. 11 matches, Saddle & Cycle — last year’s Series 4 champion — leads the series with 98 points, while Winnetka, Hinsdale GC and Glen Ellyn are next with 88, 86 and 82. Then there are four teams between 76 and 71 points.
The bottom eight ranges between 63 and 43 points. One of the teams in that second tier is last year’s playoff winner, North Shore, which still has a power-packed lineup with the likes of Wil Colmar (-1.4 PTI), Harry Sullivan (-0.6), Conor Casas (14.4) and Paul Buckingham (4.4), among others. But North Shore currently sits in 10th place with 62 points. They just tied 15th-place Indian Hill, 6-6, with Colmar/Ryan Sullivan (28.5) losing in the top slot to Drew Campbell (6.6) and Scott Bondurant (8.1).
So yeah, Series 3 isn’t for the meek.
“Every team can compete,” Watrous said. “That's what it comes down to.”
Clarkson, the Lakeshore captain, is 35 and comes from a paddle-playing family. He’s been playing in the leagues since graduating from college. He can see the growth of the sport by the quality of his series.
“I don't have a tennis background,” he said. “I played soccer in high school, that type of thing. But the better players on our team are all like D-I tennis guys or D-I athletes of some sort. Our top two courts, in general, are playing against pros of some sort.”
This is second year in Series 3 and Clarkson said he’s already noticed a change.
“We used to be able to match a power player and a ‘Steady Eddie’ type of guy” in the top two courts, but those days are over,” he said. “We gotta have big guns on courts 1 and 2.”
Robert Stineman, who plays for Skokie’s Series 3 (he also plays Series 1 with Wilmette), is liking the influx of college tennis-level talent in the sport.
“It's my experience in the last five years or so especially, there's more and more tennis guys playing the games,” he said. “It’s getting faster, there's a lot more spin being hit. And for me, I make my living off of being stingy, just getting balls back and hitting spots. So I kind of like those guys with all that pace and spin, it gives me more opportunities to use it against them.”
Every club, seemingly, has young former D-I tennis players who are quickly figuring out the paddle game.
“I’ve been humbled,” said Gerow, Hinsdale’s Series 3 captain with a 28.7 PTI and a 6-4 record.
Like many players at this level, Larko, the Wilmette captain, plays in different series with different clubs. He is a Court 1 player in Series 3, a 2 or 3 in Series 2 with Lakeshore Sport & Fitness and a 4 in Series 1 with LifeSport Lincolnshire.
What’s the difference between the series?
Larko (11.6 PTI) noted a Series 3 player like him might be able to play on Court 4 in Series 1, but the worst of the best in Series 3 couldn’t match up every night in the top series, which is why there are only six teams right now.
“As someone who's currently playing in all three of them, there's not a huge difference until you start talking about the courts, which is where it really matters,” he said. “Why there's so many teams in 3 is more about being able to field a team of guys. There's only six teams in Series 1 and that's because there's just not enough players to field full teams that are Series 1 caliber.”
While the travel can be a pain — Clarkson half-joked that players in the city seem more open to sitting out matches in the southwest suburbs — it’s also a way to branch out and meet more people. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods and the suburbs have their own similar pods.
If you live in the North Shore and work in the city, how often do you get out to Hinsdale? If you live in Hinsdale, how often do you find yourself in a tucked-away club off Sheridan Rd. in Lake Forest, with snow falling and youth hockey games going on nearby? It’s a nice way to expand your provincial horizons.
And for a guy like Bouchard, a Hinsdale Central grad who played tennis at Denison University, it’s a chance to see old friends.
“I grew up in the Chicago area, so it's a lot of reconnecting with guys that I haven't seen since I was 16 or 17 playing junior tennis, most of which are now super high-level paddle players like Colmar, who I played at the same racquet club where we did drills together. Karl Morgan and I played each in the state tournament in high school.”
But, for better or worse, this super-league might be a one-off.
“As of now,” Watrous said, “it is definitely the plan to to avoid that (again).”
Larko, for one, said he “will be surprised if in the next couple of years they don't create a Southwest league for at least a Series 3 level.”
Currently, 7 and 9 are the highest Southwest series. But as Gerow told me, Hinsdale Golf Club only had four teams a couple of years ago and now they have 10.
Every week, it seems, my Series 36 team is sharing a club with Series 3 squad. This past week, Ruth Lake was at Winnetka and a few of us watched Bryan Bertola and Tony Soruco (Winnetka) beat Anthony Appleyard and Sam Meyer on Court 2, 6-2, 7-5.
(Judging by his massive frame, we guessed Bertola was a college athlete in his past life, and I found out he was the nation’s leading D-III 3-point shooter at Lake Forest College in the 2000-01 season.)
The points in these matches are so long, the players so in control, it almost feels choreographed. It’s jarring to see a guy miss a shot at all. For guys like me, who will never get to that level, it’s almost mind-blowing to see the game played at this level.
“It's even fun for me, as a captain, just to show up and watch,” Clarkson said. “Because I'm nowhere near a court 1 or 2 guy. It's just fun to watch guys on my team play against pros from other teams.”