Italian translation at settesei.it
Serena Williams returned to professional tennis this month after more than a year of pregnancy, childbirth, and recovery. She took wild cards into both Indian Wells and Miami, competing as an unseeded player for the first time since August 2011. In her initial effort in California, she reached the third round before falling to sister Venus, and this week in Miami, she drew Indian Wells champ Naomi Osaka in her opening match and went home early, losing 6-3 6-2.
Seeing Serena without a number next to her name feels wrong. She left the tour for maternity leave just after winning last year’s Australian Open, a title that moved her back into the No. 1 ranking position. While she is clearly rusty–as she has been after previous absences–there’s little doubt she’ll quickly resume competing at a top-32 level (the threshold for an Indian Wells or Miami seed), if not considerably higher.
The brutal Miami draw and Serena’s ensuing early exit prompted all sorts of commentary, much of it calling for a rule change, some castigating the WTA for its lack of a maternity leave policy. The latter is not quite true: The WTA rulebook addresses absences for childbirth and treats returning players almost exactly as it handles women coming back from injury. Nevertheless, edge cases–like the greatest player in women’s tennis rejoining the tour without a single ranking point to her name–tend to put rules to the test.
Seedings are not just a convenient way to identify the top players on a printed bracket. They have an effect on the outcome of the tournament. In the March tournaments, seeded players get free passes to the second round. At every event, the seeding system keeps top players away from each other until the final rounds. Even minor differences, like the one between the fourth and fifth seeds, can have a major effect on two players’ potential routes to the title. This is all to say: Seedings matter, not just to returning players like Serena, but also to everyone else in the draw. While granting a seed to Williams right now may be the right thing to do, it would also push another seeded player into the unseeded pool, affecting that competitor’s chances at late-round ranking points and prize money. It’s important to acknowledge how the rules affect the entire field.
In a moment, I’ll outline various approaches the WTA could take to deal with future maternity leaves. I don’t have a strong opinion; there’s merit in each of them, as I’ll try to explain. What is most important to me, as a fan, is that any rules adopted are designed for the benefit of the whole tour, not just patches to handle once-in-a-generation superstars. Serena deserves a fair shake from the WTA, and her peers are entitled to the same.
1. Minor tweaks to the existing rule. The most likely outcome is almost always the status quo, and Osaka notwithstanding, the status quo is not that bad. The WTA rules allow for returning players (whether from injury or motherhood) to use a “Special Ranking” (SR) in eight events, including two slams. The SR is the player’s ranking at the time she left the tour, and it determines whether she qualifies to enter tournaments upon her return. While Serena used wild cards for her two events thus far (more on that later), she could have used her SR for either or both.
In other words, new mothers are already allowed to pick up where they left off … with the important exception of seeding. Serena’s SR will allow her to enter, say, the French Open as if she were the No. 1 ranked player, but unless Roland Garros invokes their right to tweak seedings (like Wimbledon does), her seed will be determined by her actual ranking at that time. Since it’s only two months away, it’s very possible she’ll be unseeded there as well, making possible another nasty first-round matchup in the vein of the Simona Halep–Maria Sharapova opener at last year’s US Open.
The debate over seeding boils down to “respect” versus “practicality.” Serena’s achievements and her probable quick return to greatness suggest that she “deserves” to be seeded as such. On the other hand, many players (including Sharapova, different as her situation is) have had a hard time returning to their previous level. The post-comeback results of Sharapova or, more recently, Novak Djokovic, indicates that a star’s ranking 12 months ago might not tell you much about how she’ll play now. Seedings exist partly to induce top players to compete, but also to increase the likelihood that the best women will face each other in the final rounds. By the latter criterion, it’s not clear that Serena (or any returning player) should immediately reclaim a top seed.
If the WTA does stick with this basic principle, I would suggest offering a few more SR entries–perhaps 12 instead of 8, and 3 slams instead of 2. Maternity leave necessitates more time on the sidelines than the six-month injury break required to qualify for the SR rule, and it may require still more time to return to form. The WTA might also convince the ITF to offer an additional few SR entries to lower-level events. Kei Nishikori came back from injury by playing a couple of Challengers; women might prefer to get their feet wet with a few ITF $100Ks before using their SR entries on top-tier events.
2. Link seeding to Special Rankings. The second option is essentially what fans wanted when they realized Serena might not make it to the Miami second round. Instead of using current ranking to determine seeding, tournaments could use SR for players who used them to enter the event.
There is a precedent for this: Monica Seles was given a top seeding when she returned from injuries sustained during her 1993 on-court stabbing. More than two years later, she came back as the top seed in Canada and the second seed at the 1995 US Open, where she lived up to that draw placement, winning 11 matches in a row before falling to Steffi Graf in the New York final.
The pros and cons of this route are the opposite of the first proposal. Giving players their pre-break seeding would show respect for their accomplishments, but since most players don’t come back from any length time off court the way Seles did, it’s possible the seedings would appear overly optimistic. (And yes, I realize the irony of saying so during the 2018 Miami tournament, when the top two seeded women won only one match between them.)
3. Devise a time-off-court algorithm. Players usually need some time to resume their former level, but their skill upon return has some relationship to how they played before. When I wrote about Sharapova’s return from her drugs ban last year, I showed that elite players who missed a year or more (for whatever reason), tended to play much worse than their pre-break level for their first five or so matches, and then a moderately lower level for the next 50. I measured it in Elo points: a 200 point drop at first, then a 100 point drop.
I don’t expect the WTA to adopt Elo anytime soon, but an algorithm of this sort could be based on any ranking system, and it represents a reasonable compromise between the first two positions. For someone as dominant as Serena, it would fulfill most of her fans’ wishes: A 200-point drop from her pre-break level would still leave her roughly even with Halep, meaning that a system of this sort would’ve made her the first or second seed in this month’s draws.
A better illustration of how the algorithm would work requires a player who didn’t so overwhelmingly outclass the rest of the field: If Wozniacki (current Elo: 2156) were to miss the next year, her seeding upon return would use an Elo 200 points lower, of 1956, dropping her to about 30th (assuming all the top players were competing). After the first five matches, when players usually start getting their groove back, her seedings would rise to around 15th. Several months in, her ranking would rise, and her seeding would no longer need to be adjusted.
The obvious flaw here is the level of complexity. My algorithm is approximate at best and would need to be improved for such an important role. The advantage, though, is that if an acceptable formula could be found, it would allow the WTA to offer a perfect compromise between the needs of returning mothers and the rights of the rest of the field.
And about those wild cards…
I’ve mentioned that Serena used wild cards to enter both Indian Wells and Miami, even though she could have used her Special Ranking. Just about every WTA event would happily hand her a wild card, as they should. So in Serena’s case, the SR rule is largely irrelevant–if it didn’t exist, she could immediately resume a full schedule.
I also wrote that, as a fan, what matters to me is that all tour players are treated equally. Tournament entries are opportunities to gain ranking points, which in turn determine entries and seeding, which affects the likelihood of racking up wins and titles. Wild cards are often thought of as gifts, but we rarely acknowledge the effect that those gifts have on the players who rarely get them. Because tournaments understandably tend to hand out free passes to home-country players (like Donald Young) and marquee personalities (like Eugenie Bouchard), the wild card system introduces systemic bias into rankings and results. Wild cards can’t make a journeyman into a superstar, but they can boost a player from the top 200 to the top 100, or from No. 70 to No. 50. For some tour players, these differences really matter.
Thus, when a superstar or media darling–or just a player from a country that happens to host a lot of tournaments, like the United States–returns from maternity leave, injury, or a suspension, the regular rules don’t apply. Maria Sharapova was wild carded into most of the tournaments she wanted to play last year, while Sara Errani has spent the last six months playing ITFs, $125Ks, and qualifying. Sharapova gets to play matches with 100 ranking points at stake while Errani contests entire tournaments with less on the line.
Wildly different as their cases are, Serena’s situation with regard to wild cards is the same as Sharapova’s. Her allotment of SR entries doesn’t matter. But imagine if, say, Anastasija Sevastova or Magdalena Rybarikova took time off to have a child. They might get a few free entries into European international-level events, or maybe a wild card into a tournament they’ve previously won. But for the most part, a Sevastova or a Rybarikova–despite taking her hypothetical absence while a top-20 player–would be jealously protecting her eight SRs. She would need them.
Just to be clear, I’m not trying to say that Serena doesn’t “deserve” all the wild cards she’s going to get. Her achievements make it obvious that she does. On a tour where events can award draw places at their discretion, no one deserves them more. However, the very existence of those discretionary spots means that maternity leave means something very different for Serena than it would for the more anonymous players near the top of the WTA rankings.
How about this proposal, then: For players coming back from maternity leave, expand the number of SR entries from 8 to 12, and tack on another four free entries to ITFs, so that returning players can have a child knowing that they’ll be able to compete at the top level for nearly a season once they come back. But–they may accept no wild cards during that time. If they take a wild card, they lose their SRs. That proposal would put all players on an even keel: Close to a year of tournament entries at their pre-break ranking. It would give the next Serena-level superstar plenty of time to regain her lost status, and best of all, it would do the same for her lesser-known peers.