UTR rates all players on a single 16-point scale, without regard to age, gender, nationality, or locale of a given match.
UTR rates all players—men, women, and children—on a single 16-point scale (with two decimal places, e.g., 11.29) that works for players globally regardless of their skill level, from beginners to top professional competitors.
Rankings are ordinal numbers that reflect only the athletes' relative positions, not their playing skill as measured by a standard yardstick.
The plethora of ranking systems and the lack of a shared metric has created a “Tower of Babel” in international tennis.
National federations, tournaments, coaches, teams, colleges, and individual players speak different languages that do not readily translate into one another.
Alex Cancado, a tennis player and web designer in the area, developed an algorithm to operationalize Howell’s rating system.
This enables French tournament directors to facilitate "level-based play" — orchestrating matches between players of comparable skill, often without regard to their age or gender.
He and his colleagues also made UTR more precise than the French system by entering the number of games won in a match, not only the won/lost result.
UTR gradually spread from Virginia to other tennis venues in the United States, particularly in junior events which, as noted, often include many non-competitive matches.
The system also gained traction in college tennis, which in recent decades has evolved into a truly global sport that embraces young athletes from all tennis-playing nations.
Consequently, in recent years UTR has become a "gold standard" for assessing collegiate tennis recruits, both internationally and domestically.
The group's partners include Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle Corporation; Ken Hao, managing partner of Silver Lake Partners; Jan Leschly, former CEO of SmithKline Beecham, a former top-ten ATP player and former chairman of the International Tennis Hall of Fame; Ken Solomon, president of the Tennis Channel; the Tennis Media Company; Major League Baseball; and the Los Angeles Dodgers' ownership group.
Separating players into groups by age and gender does organize draws simply, but it also throws together competitors in ways that are unrelated to their tennis skill.
These in turn depend on PPR amassed in previous tournaments, regardless of opponents' strengths or actual match scores.
The resulting draws often pit top players against much lower-ranked athletes, especially in early rounds, frequently leading to one-sided matches.
In contrast, designing draws or flights with UTR consistently produces many more matches between athletes of roughly equal ability.
Furthermore, research has shown that when players' UTRs differ by more than 1.0 point, the lower-rated athlete will upset his or her higher-rated opponent only 3 percent of the time.
Close, competitive contests are widely recognized by coaches as the most powerful engine for developing tennis skill.
Non-competitive, one-sided matches, in contrast, typically discourage the loser and fail to challenge the winner, offering neither one much opportunity to improve his or her skills.
UTR's 16-point scale embraces everyone from beginners through intermediate recreational and competitive players, to active tournament and college varsity athletes, and ranging up to the highest levels of the game at the top professional ranks.