The Universal Tennis Rating (UTR) is calculated based on the strength of who you play and the score (games won), not the result. The current USTA system forces club pros to make difficult decisions about who makes teams, who gets relegated, etc. As more clubs start using UTR to track players and host tournaments, it could help solve that.
Universal Tennis Rating (UTR) is a rating system that could revolutionize the sport at every level—from country club play, to college recruiting, to the very top of the professional tours, Axios reported.
The current ATP (men) and WTA (women) rankings are based on point accumulation, which benefits pros who get easier draws or play more matches and junior players whose parents have enough money to travel to tournaments, Axios reported. By contrast, UTR is calculated based on the strength of who you play and the score (games won), not the result. It takes into account the past 30 matches—or however many that person has played in the past 12 months.
Players are rated on a scale from 1 (raw beginner) to 16.5 (Rafael Nadal has a 16.19 rating), and anyone can register and start working on a rating for free, Axios reported. Like a golf handicap, it’s a simple number that gives players a way to judge results other than win-loss and can show improvement when a weaker player does better than expected, but still loses, to a better player.
UTR pays no attention to age or gender, so it allows play between genders and mixed doubles matches to count just like any other result would, Axios reported.
UTR was originally launched in 2008 to help match junior players more fairly in local tournaments, Axios reported. It has since evolved into something much bigger.
UTR is now the primary method that college coaches use to recruit players, since it allows them to more accurately compare kids from different regions, Axios reported. The current USTA system, which ranks people by 0.5 increments, forces country club pros to make difficult decisions about who makes teams, who gets relegated, etc. As more clubs start using UTR to track players and host tournaments, it could help solve that.
“I’ll predict that within a year, just as it is understood that any remotely serious golfer has to maintain a handicap to play in an event, any semi-serious tennis player, kid or adult, will have a UTR rating,” said Stewart Verdery of Washington Golf & Country Club in Arlington, Va.
UTR ratings have begun popping up on broadcasts next to names like Roger Federer and Serena Williams, giving rise to the theory that UTR could become a “mainstream” ranking system and perhaps even replace the ATP and WTA rankings, Axios reported.
That isn’t part of the plan, according to UTR CEO Mark Leschly.
“I think they tell different stories,” Leschly said. “The ATP tells a 12-month story of how far you went in major tournaments. With us, it’s how you’re competing.”
Plus, most players and tournament hosts are content with the current system because it’s designed to reward players for participating in as many tournaments as possible, Axios reported.
UTR has emerged as a widely accepted ranking system at the pinnacle of tennis, Axios reported. But with the pro circuit representing just a sliver of the world’s tennis population, UTR could have an even greater impact serving as the glue that binds tennis players of all ages, genders and skill levels together—much like the handicap system has done for golf.
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