Tennis is a worldwide game, and in recent decades intercollegiate tennis, which happens mainly in the United States, has become a truly international phenomenon. Players from all over the planet flock to the United States to earn degrees and play competitive ball at the same time.
Yet with more than 2,700 different ranking systems in use worldwide, college coaches find their heads spinning as they try to accurately evaluate recruits.
Doing so is hard enough domestically, but add in hundreds of other nations with idiosyncratic ranking systems and you have a real conundrum.
Luckily, there’s a tennis metric system that allows any coach or player, anywhere, to get a reliable fix on the actual skill level of an unknown recruit or opponent. That would be the Universal Tennis Rating.
In the United States, college coaches routinely use UTR to evaluate recruits and manage their lineups—and as a global system, it’s especially useful for international recruiting.
Hundreds of campus-based coaches rely on it every day, “from Moscow to Melbourne, Miami to Minneapolis,” says Harvard men’s coach Dave Fish.
On the athletes’ side, thousands of tennis-playing students in the United States and abroad find UTR an indispensable tool in researching colleges where they might play: varsity lineups, and the players’ UTRs, are instantly available. It’s a great way to find the optimal college “fit” for a young athlete.
The Power 6 ratings can also help coaches determine which colleges to put on their schedules. For example, Dan Oosterhous, the head men’s coach at the U.S. Air Force Academy, applies UTR data to optimize his college team’s schedule in coming seasons.
Junior athletes seeking to showcase their talents and join a college varsity have a sterling opportunity in the Oracle/ITA Junior Masters Championship, an exciting new series of events for young players.
It’s staged in partnership with UTR, which provides data to select entrants for 10 regional tournaments, whose winners will come together for an October playoff at the Malibu Racquet Club in Malibu, California, working in concert with Pepperdine University. UTR will direct all match play for the junior divisions.
The versatility of the UTR system also means it can help the rank-and-file tennis coach in many different ways, allowing coaches to do that challenging job better—and with much less effort.