ITF junior/ Pro career ranking comparisions/ co-relation

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sameerph
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Re: AITA Fenesta Nationals

Post by sameerph »

Atithee wrote:Sameer, yes I agree but I think only top 2-3 junior rankings have much significance in extrapolating it to future senior success. That's why my only nit with your argument(s) in this thread is that you only consider top 2 juniors rather than at least 10. Also, the trend seems to have been bending since 2006 really even for the #2 player but it may be because they take a long time to peak so time will tell.

I'll go on a limb and predict that if you expand this correlation to #10, your theory will breakdown. If I have the time, I'll do this on my own.

You are right about players peaking later. If you see those from 2004 to 2006, Monfils , Young , Cilic & De Bakker have all started moving up now as are 2007 top 2 ( they were much below 200) when I posted this about couple of years ago. 2008 no. 1 Yang Tsung Hua is at his career high now. Hoepfully no.2 Yuki Bhambri will move into that direction soon.


Regarding your point about doing this analysis for top 10 , I have done it for one year & I have chosen 2003 ( as players would have reached maturity by now & will be aged 25-26.)

So, these are ATP career high ranking for 2003 year end top 10 juniors -
1. Marcos BAGHDATIS 8
2. Jo-Wilfried TSONGA 8
3. Florin MERGEA (ROU) 243
4. Daniel GIMENO-TRAVER 52
5. Sebastian RIESCHICK 199
6. Andy MURRAY 2
7. Brian BAKER 172
8. Leonardo KIRCHE 262
9. Alex KUZNETSOV 158
10. Frederico GIL 62
So, 5 out of 10 have hit top 100 , 3 others have managed to get into top 200 while 2 have only reached top 300. So, results are bit mixed. It may be worthwhile to do this for couple more years to get clearer data.

Will try later as it is not too too difficult. You get the list of top 10 juniors for any of the years on the ITF site -

ITF juniors top 10

Then, you can click on their profile & display thier mens circuit record.

It will be also worthwhile checking the other way around as Prashant suggested of ATP top 100 players & their best junior ranking. But, that is much more difficult to do.
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Re: AITA Fenesta Nationals

Post by kujo »

sameerph wrote:
It will be also worthwhile checking the other way around as Prashant suggested of ATP top 100 players & their best junior ranking. But, that is much more difficult to do.
Sameer & Prashant,

check out slide 16 in Atithee's post titled "How does senior Top 200 players performed on junior level? "
Atithee wrote: This is even better (see slides 12-17):
Are performances at young age a good predictor of later success ...
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Re: AITA Fenesta Nationals

Post by vk2052 »

VOW- What an analysis. Great but too complicated. I believe that some of the top juniors make it to the top 100 men. There are many examples. However, there are some examples- like nishikori. He never played junior, but has made it to the top. Nishikori also breaks a myth. Tall and powerful men make to the top. He is just 5'8" and is only taller than rochus brothers and fabio fognini- all top players. But nishikori was picked up by japanese firms and they put him up at NBTA, with a pro coach, at a tender age of just 16. He is being trained , for the last 5 years, professionally to become like one.

Now compare nishikori with our own yuki and karan. Our guys did very well at junior level- without any support at all. Then img signed them but did not put any coach with them. They were on their own. So their progress was anything but great.

Typical example is karan. In juniors he had wins against players like fognini and Chardy- both top 50 players now. Karan was unlucky also , as he suffered serious injury when things were going his way- sponsors and performance etc.

I will again come to my point that A PROFESSIONAL COACH IS A MUST TO GROOM THE TALENTED BOYS. AND THAT IS THE BIGGEST PROBLEM WITH OUR BOYS. PERIOD.
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Re: AITA Fenesta Nationals

Post by kujo »

nice digging around by Atithee, thanks for finding a good ppt presentation of research relevant to our discussions.

Here is my interpretation of slide 16, men's chart - bars grouped under "ITF top20"

Data set:
Senior World Rankings: Top 200 players –Since 1992 till 2008 from Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP)
n = 666 (98+57+166+345)
ITF Rankings (-18y) (Int. Tennis-federation) from ITF Top 100 players - Since 1988 until 2008
n =1422

ITF Top-20 player performance:
ATP 1-20 46.9% of 98 = 46
ATP 21-50 31.3% of 57 = 18
ATP 51-100 23.5% of 166 = 39
ATP 101-200 19.1% of 345 = 66

ATP 1-200 25.4% of 666 = 169
i.e) 25.4% of top 200 ATP players were ranked in top-20 ITF junior rankings

To put this in another way, fully 75% of the top 200 ATP players from 1992 to 2008 were never ranked in top 20 of ITF junior rankings!! What this points to, is a definite lack of participation rate (in ITF junior tournaments) among the future tennis professionals. Unlike NCAA football, basketball programs which mostly recruit their athletes through the high-school system, and which in turn feed them to NFL and NBA as professionals. We do not have such a strong junior program in tennis. So, a lack of strength in junior tournaments leads to the misconception that juniors are a waste of time and you got to hit the senior circuit to get serious competition and test yourself against good talent....

Not having access to the actual research paper, I do have some quibbles. But regardless, it is great to go through the results presented here. :)

cheers
kujo
Last edited by kujo on Thu Oct 13, 2011 3:59 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: AITA Fenesta Nationals

Post by Prashant »

I did read the presentation that Atithee posted. If my understanding is correct, here are my conclusions:

1. There is extremely weak correlation between youth & adult performance in general (see slide 12). I don't consider an r^2 of .037 statistically significant, even if the authors do. That is slightly better than random chance.

2. Winning a youth tournament does have some predictive value of senior success - but even this is weak because only 43.2% of youth tournament winners reach the top 200 as seniors (slide 14). This seems to be counter to the argument of playing junior tournaments.

3. Slide 15 extends this to say that only 40.8% of youth tournament finalists ever reach the top 200 seniors, and only 29.6% reach the top 100.

I may very well be misunderstanding that presentation or the implications of the statistics - does anyone draw different conclusions?

EDIT: I realize I cross posted this with Kujo, but he seems to come to similar conclusions.
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Re: AITA Fenesta Nationals

Post by kujo »

Out of curiosity, I did the same calculations for the bars grouped under "ITF top 100" in slide 16.
64.3% of 98 = 63
49.6% of 57 = 28
44.0% of 166 = 73
44.3% of 345 = 153

total = 317 / 666 = 47.6%
i.e) 47.6% of top 200 ATP players were ranked in top-100 ITF junior rankings

to put it the other way, more than half of the top 200 ATP players were never ranked in ITF top 100 junior rankings!!
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Re: AITA Fenesta Nationals

Post by sameerph »

vk2052 wrote:However, there are some examples- like nishikori. He never played junior, but has made it to the top.
For you information, Nishikori was ranked as high as no. 7 in ITF juniors & played ITF juniors extensively till 2006 when he was past 17. After that he did not compete in juniors only in his last eligible year ( the same thing which Yuki did ) . This is fine as both had quite good amount of success at junior level before permanently moving to seniors. ( contrary to the likes of Ramkumar & Mohit Mahur who have given up juniors much earlier & without having achieved much at this level.

ATP 1-200 25.4% of 666 = 169
i.e) 25.4% of top 200 ATP players were ranked in top-20 ITF junior rankings

47.6% of top 200 ATP players were ranked in top-100 ITF junior rankings

Kujo, somehow I find it hard to believe this data. My earlier data of top 10 junior ranked players of 2003 suggested that there would be at least 5 of them would be in top 100 & if you consider that ATP rankings are built over players across 10 year age groups, then at 50% of the players in ATP top 100 should have been in ITF top 10.

However, if we consider the data above , the % seems to be somewhere around 25 % & out of the rest of 75% , around 47% have not even tried ITF juniors ( considering that they were not ITF top 100.) . That is hard to believe as if you look at top 50 or so , except for an odd rare talent like Nadal everyone else seems to have played ITF juniors seriously.

Need to do some analysis of current top 100 or at least top 50 players by one of us to confirm these results .
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Re: AITA Fenesta Nationals

Post by Atithee »

I have done a lot of digging on the juniors rankings over the last ten years (as Sameer implored me to do although I was planning to do it on my own) and will post my results shortly. Just to give an idea of what I've done -- I took top 10 junior ranks for the last ten years or so and checked their current and career best ATP ranking. The average best ATP ranking was 221 but with a very high std deviation of 232. Therefore, I think median is a better measure (as real estate uses for housing values) and it was 142. I plan to do some more analysis, but it does seem that if a junior has achieved a top-10 ranking, there is a good chance that they will achieve ATP top-150 ranking. However, as I was digging, I got intrigued by the country of origin data and suspect that players from only a few countries are successful in this transition (and that Asians are not among them; actually, there are not many top-10 Asian juniors to begin with). More to follow. But if anyone wants the raw data or has other ideas for statistical analysis, let me know.

Here is some country/region data that I found interesting (1997-2010 Top 10 junior players):

Most players represented by country: France (16), USA (11), Argentina (7), Brazil (6)

Most players by region/sub-region: Europe (39), Scandinavia (9), E Europe (20), Russia (3), South America (20), North/Central America (15), Asia (7 that had four from TPE, two in one year from Korea who haven't done much in their careers although one achieved a career high of 230), Africa (3), and Australia (4)

It seems that France is really active in the juniors and overall South America is also a nursery of junior tennis but Europe is where the real action is. I was surprised at only 11 Americans in 14 years ranked in top-10 in junior tennis and Australia having only 4. This data demonstrates the gradual shift of tennis power from US/Australia to Europe and S America.



Perhaps we should publish a paper? That would be awesome!

P.S. The r^2 was rather poor for all years ranging from -0.39 to 0.70. Of course, the more recent the data, lower the r^2 value, as one would expect.
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Re: AITA Fenesta Nationals

Post by kujo »

Atithee wrote: I took top 10 junior ranks for the last ten years or so and checked their current and career best ATP ranking. The average best ATP ranking was 221 but with a very high std deviation of 232. Therefore, I think median is a better measure (as real estate uses for housing values) and it was 142. I plan to do some more analysis, but it does seem that if a junior has achieved a top-10 ranking, there is a good chance that they will achieve ATP top-150 ranking.
Nice work...

your data set would have about 85 players (top 10 players for past 10 years or so)? I am interested in (rather than the average of their best ATP ranks):
xx% made it into the ATP top 50
xx% made it into the ATP top 100
xx% made it into the ATP top 150
xx% made it into the ATP top 200

Note: a good data set for above analysis should not include the junior players from the most recent 4 years, since that time is required for juniors to mature and be competitive at senior level.

I expect 50% of your data set to break into top 100. anything more than 65%, is a positive surprise and anything less than 40% points to the dilution of talent at junior level....
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Re: AITA Fenesta Nationals

Post by Atithee »

Kujo,

There is a bit of duplication because some players appeared in successive years at different positions and I'm too lazy to account for it. Therefore, my denominator is exactly 100 or 140 for the two data sets below. There were not too many repeats (I think no more than 2-3). I am not sure why you expected N=85 or so. May be I am missing something.

But here is the data you sought:

1997-2010, 1997-2006 only

Top 50 -- 31%, 30%
Top 100 -- 44%, 41%
Top 150 -- 51%, 48%
Top 200 -- 60%, 52%

It is interesting that the former numbers are higher as one would have expected the opposite. It may be showing that today's juniors make more rapid transition to top rungs than previous years but this is a very simple analysis with a huge skew in data.

BTW, Jay's multiplier got me started on this and here is the data that I could establish (again, duplications included):

Senior best:Junior ranking multiplier (1997-2010):

Median 27.5, Average 49, Std Dev 76

So, it seems that the multiplier is much higher than 10-15 that Jay suggested, i.e., players achieve a ranking of about 28 times their junior top-10 ranking. If I include only top-3 players, the same numbers are higher as expected (40, 81, 122) and doesn't change much for Top-2 (43, 94, 144).
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Re: AITA Fenesta Nationals

Post by jayakris »

At various times over the last 10-12 years, I have done similar analysis. Not by making a rigorous full datasets etc, but doing random checks on a lot of players around the world, which is how I deducted approximate multiplier numbers and all that. I had argued this from several years back a couple of other times too (not this elaborately, with all of you running stats on it -- I love it!). [Most of what I have often said in opposition to the "no-juniors-its-useless" advice these days, etc, are also based on a lot of such observations by just looking at numbers though not running stats].

One correction though. My multiplier really applies to the AVERAGE ranking in the latter half of their best junior year (often at age 18, but if they left at age 17 with a high rank like Yuki, Tomic etc, then their best ranking). Tough to define it, though, and I was going by what I vaguely remembered about where the players were at that point, etc. I had always disregarded and downgraded the BEST ranking a bit in my observational conclusions in the past unless it is from age 17. So, the 10-15 probably still applies to their effective position in the junior totem pole with the cohort of players they competed against...

That is why I have said many times in the past that our juniors have in fact done better in seniors than I expected, and that only very few have gone the other way. I had never totally opposed those who said it was patently otherwise, though - and only said that it was generally not as bad as they all thought. It looks like all this new analysis shows that there is evidence that our kids have CERTAINLY done better than expected, later. What a surprise it must be, for many people! The point is that, a lot of those players have given a lot of blood and sweat later to improve (Harsh, Bops, Sunil, Vishnu, Mustafa, Divij, etc etc) when many were complaining that they wasted their promise as juniors.

[I will move all this to another thread soon, but let us keep it going here for now. Good to talk about it in a thread of a tournament where many of our upcoming players are playing]

Jay
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Re: AITA Fenesta Nationals

Post by kujo »

Atithee wrote: I am not sure why you expected N=85 or so. May be I am missing something.
well, I was thinking there would be 15 duplicates (hence n=85, instead of 100). Looks like you had 3 duplicates? if you account for the duplicates, these percentages would improve a little bit.

I set my expectation at 50% and a boundary of 40 (lower) to 65 (upper) for the percentage of top-10 ITF players who would reach top-100 in ATP. Your data (41%) validates that range and if anything, it points to a little bit of dilution in junior tournaments

thanks for the efforts...
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Re: AITA Fenesta Nationals

Post by kujo »

sameerph wrote:
kujo wrote:ATP 1-200 25.4% of 666 = 169
i.e) 25.4% of top 200 ATP players were ranked in top-20 ITF junior rankings

47.6% of top 200 ATP players were ranked in top-100 ITF junior rankings
Kujo, somehow I find it hard to believe this data. My earlier data of top 10 junior ranked players of 2003 suggested that there would be at least 5 of them would be in top 100 & if you consider that ATP rankings are built over players across 10 year age groups, then at 50% of the players in ATP top 100 should have been in ITF top 10.

However, if we consider the data above , the % seems to be somewhere around 25 % & out of the rest of 75% , around 47% have not even tried ITF juniors ( considering that they were not ITF top 100.) . That is hard to believe as if you look at top 50 or so , except for an odd rare talent like Nadal everyone else seems to have played ITF juniors seriously.

Need to do some analysis of current top 100 or at least top 50 players by one of us to confirm these results .
Sameer you have some valid points. alright, I am volunteering for something close to what you want... :)

Method:
get the current top 200 ATP players - Oct 2011 ranking list
get the top 20 ITF juniors (based on year end ranking) for each year from 1997 through 2008 and see whether any of them are present in the above top 200 list

I agree that this is a snap shot and not a historical view (i.e. does not consider the best ranking achieved in ATP tour). Still it should give us a good picture of these 20* 12 years = 240 top junior talents in the past 12 years. Actually - there are only 200 unique junior players in that list; after accounting for multiple appearances in different years' ranking lists. :)
Last edited by kujo on Fri Oct 14, 2011 12:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: AITA Fenesta Nationals

Post by Atithee »

Kujo, I can mail you this list but only for top-10. I am not sure a top-20 junior list is available any where but it may be.

And before you do anything else, check this guy out. The second link has already probably answered a lot of our questions.

http://www.mccrawmethod.com/research.html

http://www.mccrawmethod.com/downloads/2 ... 20Tour.pdf
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Re: AITA Fenesta Nationals

Post by kujo »

Not surprisingly, the numbers do add up and I have 25% as the result of this new analysis.
i.e) 25% of top 200 ATP players were ranked in top-20 ITF junior rankings

These are the 50 players who are now in top 200 ATP rankings AND who were in the top 20 ITF junior rankings (1997 to 2008):

Andy Murray
Andy Roddick
Bernard Tomic
Brian Dabul
Daniel Gimeno-Traver
David Nalbandian
Donald Young
Dudi Sela
Eduardo Schwank
Eric Prodon
Fabio Fognini
Florian Mayer
Frederico Gil
Gael Monfils
Gilles Muller
Go Soeda
Greg Jones
Grigor Dimitrov
Igor Sijsling
Janko Tipsarevic
Jarkko Nieminen
Jeremy Chardy
Jerzy Janowicz
Jo-Wilfried Tsonga
Julien Benneteau
Leonardo Mayer
Lleyton Hewitt
Lukas Lacko
Marcos Baghdatis
Mardy Fish
Marin Cilic
Martin Klizan
Nicolas Mahut
Olivier Rochus
Philipp Petzschner
Ricardas Berankis
Richard Gasquet
Robin Haase
Robin Soderling
Roger Federer
Ryan Sweeting
Sam Querrey
Steve Darcis
Thiemo De Bakker
Tomas Berdych
Tommy Robredo
Tsung-Hua Yang
Viktor Troicki
Xavier Malisse
Yen-Hsun Lu


Let me know if I have missed any.

Again, 75% of the current top 200 players were NEVER ranked in the top 20 of the ITF junior rankings.
Note: This conclusion is based on past 15 years of ITF junior rankings data (starting 1997). I am not too worried about 2009, 2010 list of top 20 juniors, although there might be a couple of exceptions who might have reached top 200 from those years already!

cheers
kujo
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