Player Rating system and UTR Rating
View(s):At the best, less than one percent of tennis players are in rankings. True, one does not need a ranking to play tennis. Rightly, getting into a ranking even at club level is not easy. Betterment of skill level is the goal of every tennis ranking. An engine pushing playing skills. Performing abilities is the fundamental ingredient of sporting ventures. Ranking energises development.
Golf is Free Independent Sport, a F.I.S. activity. Tennis and most other sport are not. In this context, for tennis appropriate opposition is a pre-requisite for a good game. The UTR (Universal-Tennis-Rating) is a mission-help in this direction.
A new wave
Best of world players are in ATP and WTA, they are professionals, ITF and junior national rankings are for Under-18 players. These leave multitude of players out of ranking. What more, UTR is a good ladder to climb for players in non-tennis-land in Asia, Africa and the Oceanic islands.
Even to regular normal tennis enthusiast, who is not in competition, finding a playing partner for an evening tennis is a time and resource consuming effort. Clubs ladder format are limited in player numbers and not universally accessible. UTR can help to ease their search. UTR rating uses data from over eight million matches annually. An UTR registered player’s match result in the website updates the players profile automatically. Initially players will have to register themselves with UTR.
UTR as a system is filling the gap that ITF let open from inception (International Tennis Federation of 1915). There is no known agreement between ITF, ATP and WTA from what I know. Of recent, ITF has also launched a similar system like UTR. Today, tennis is exist in over 215 countries.
UTR working system
Current No.1 of the world is Novak Djokovich and he is 17.75 player. Nadal, according to the website is 16.25 player. A beginner starting and registering with UTR will start with a rating of two. Players gain nothing if they lose, however a loss to a lesser rated player will bring their rating down. UTR is a winner takes it all situation. An American University seeking to recruit a good player to play college tennis will seek players with a UTR rating of 7. Many organisations have accepted UTR to be their lead in player classification. American Collegiate Association had embrace it for player classification for their competition. This is a big boost to UTR. Our national level players will fall between 7.5 and 9 in UTR rating.
UTR pick up the player’s performances as soon as it appears in the tournament website. At any time, a registered player’s rating is current.
Activity rating
UTR ranking, like that of the professional ranking, is valid for one calendar year. This is easy to understand. However if player wins a match against a player with lesser points, there is no gain to the player. Regardless in which round of the tournament round (hard to swallow) with the system being web connected, nothing can escape.
UTR has another valid novel aspect attached to their rating. That is the activity rating. This pushes non-active players to a lower level. At any given point in time, player’s position is a calculation of UTR rating and their activity rating put together. [Players cannot sit back on the laurels of immediate past good performance].
Dave Howell
A tennis coach with a stomach for ‘actuals’ and ‘realities’ worked and found that most of the tennis matches played in tennis do not come to the threshold of the definition of ‘competitiveness’. For Howell only 27% of the matches played in tennis have the competitive edge. From my experience, I agree to this evaluation. He started UTR in 2008.
Oracle
Operationally something in this scale, nature and scope is outside manual working capacity of a man or that of a large team. In maintaining the UTR rating, the sheer volume of matches is staggering, the information from tennis match occurrence from the whole world is continual every 24 hours and analysis would consist of multitude of calculations. There is no choice but to accommodating it with full responsibility is the guarantee of UTR. Oracle system collect and processes over eight million results annually for UTR.
Tournaments
A membership gives the right to hold UTR events. The format they use is member’s choice. UTR does not dictate this. Meaning it can be a ‘Round Robin’, Knockout, League and any other feasible to the geographic location. Sri Lanka has two UTR registered members at present.
–George Paldano, European and Asian competition player; Coach German Tennis Federation; National coach Brunei and Sri Lanka; Davis Cup, Federation Cup coach, coached ATP, WTA and ITF ranked players in Europe and Asia; WhatsApp +94775448880–