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Readers on age eligibility: Abolish it; keep Williamses out of discussion

I read Matthew Cronin’s article on the age eligibility rule. While I personally think the rule should be abolished, I am not totally opposed to keeping it – if they'd do it right. This rule, as you correctly asserted, was instituted to eliminate tennis prodigies from playing too much on tour too quickly (where there is the potential for not only parental abuse, but injuries and burnout). But let's look at this realistically.

First, having this rule does nothing to eliminate the above conditions, it just exonerates the WTA from being the culprit. Since no other tennis organization has any limits to amount of play, these players could over-play in adult opens, ITF tournaments, junior tournaments, etc. The same burnout, injuries, and parental abuse situations are still there. That's why having this rule in the WTA is mostly meaningless.

For the families like the Pierces, Dokics, Lucics, parental abuse was going to be there with or without this rule (which again shows it is meaningless). Having Lucic run 10 miles after a loss could not have been prevented by having this rule!!! As to injuries and burnout, number of tournaments has little to do with this. It's the amount of extra practice time and conditioning that take its toll. You could play 1 match a day for an entire year and have an easier schedule than most players, who are training 5-7 hours per day when they are not competing.

Look at this from another perspective. Limiting Lucic and others to a smaller number of events might not have reduced the tendency for parental abuse, but may actually have increased it!!! The pressure to win, when you can only play a few tournaments, would have been even greater in her father's mind – who knows how many miles she might have had to run then. Let's look at the major downside to this rule. There are only a couple players who come along every 3-4 years who the rule is intended to reach. Yet the rule reaches EVERY player, which is an injustice. The 14- and 15-year-olds who are trying to start a professional career, and who lose most of their matches in $10k and $25k events – these players are being severely hurt by the limit in number of events they can play. Playing only eight tournaments a year can never give the average player enough of a test to determine whether they can be successful professionally or not. If these players average one win per event – that's only 16 matches maximum in a year, which is way too few. To summarize, the rule hurts 99.9% of players just to "catch" .1% of players. There's something wrong when that is the case.

The criteria for the rule is what's wrong. If the WTA believes they need this rule (maybe you'd be surprised but the USTA is trying hard to get the WTA to eliminate the rule), then they should institute it properly. Number of tournaments played is not the determining factor for injuries, burn out, and parental abuse. The real meaningful statistic is total time training (matches/practice/conditioning), but since that can't be monitored, the next best meaningful statistic is number of matches played. Using number of matches played, instead of number of tournaments, would allow this rule to apply only to those whiz kids who are successful on tour at a young age. All the rest of the average and struggling 14- to 16-year-olds could then play a full schedule of the lower tier tournaments and gain much needed experience. And the number of matches played limit could be smaller than average, and still not affect the vast majority of players. Normally, playing 75 matches a year is fine – but this rule could limit 14- and 15-year-olds to 50 matches a year.

You may have guessed – I am particularly sensitive to this rule, having a 15-year-old starting some pro circuit events and a very good 13-year-old coming on the horizon. I pray the rule gets abolished or modified by then. I do predict the rule will be eliminated within the next 24 months. One last note – Martina Hingis does have a valid analysis of developing better skills by playing more pro events at a younger age. The difference in playing the toughest junior tournaments and playing even $10k pro circuit events is noticeable. The attitude and discipline of the pro circuit players cannot be found anywhere else. It is good for juniors who aspire to a pro career to see this as soon as possible and as much as possible. If you wanted to develop a great tennis player, the "winning formula" would be to have he/she go onto the pro circuit ($10k-$75k events) full-time with a coach. There are so many great and talented hitting partners there, that along with the coaches' private instruction would produce the best results.

Lou Ulery
Boca Raton, Fla.

I'm not sure what point you were trying to make by including the Williams sisters in your article about the age eligibility rule and young players being overplayed. The Williams sisters didn't even play juniors! And they've never even played a full tour schedule when healthy! I mean which way do you guys want it? They get knocked because they don't play enough tournaments. Then they're used as examples of young players who play too much and may have short careers?! I don't get it. The Williams sisters will only quit tennis when they're tired of it.

I like the fact that they don't play even when they just get a little nick on their toe. The fact of the matter is, from what I can tell as a tennis fan, is that these young women have lives! They are multi-talented and multi-dimensional wunderkinds. So when they tweak something, they don't sink into despair and bite their nails wondering what they're going to do with themselves. Unlike Hingis and many other pro-athletes – they don't have to play hurt. Playing hurt: bad, bad, habit. I don't know why Serena's taking so long to come back or why Venus is not playing more tournaments to get back to top form. But if there is one thing I do know and you should too, never second guess big bad Richard Williams (who I'm guessing is influencing this). He's been right on the money with his daughters every time.

Charisse Waugh

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