The Summer 2017 UTR Singles League has been cancelled due to lack of interest...
Sunday, May 21, 2017
Saturday, August 20, 2016
NEW TOOL COMING SOON TO HIGH SCHOOL TENNIS
[Reprinted from UniversalTennis.com]
We hear the word “matchup” a lot in sports. How do these two players stack up? When Roger Federer was dominating the tennis world, Rafael Nadal still gave him plenty of trouble. Matchup trouble.
UTR’s new Team Compare feature lets you drill down into individual matchups on any two college tennis teams. Side by side, you’ll get players’ names, their UTRs, and see how they differ from their opponents across the net. Each team’s Power 6 rating will be there, too. And with its drag-and-drop feature, you can rearrange a team’s lineup to experiment with different matchups—and see how they change the Power 6 rating.
Team Compare is available to subscribers to UTR Premium Plus, the package that covers college tennis. It’s starting with intercollegiate ball, but Team Compare’s future includes any event with teams. (Did somebody say, “high-school tennis?”) Before Team Compare went live, American junior coach Paul MacDonald used UTRs this very way to help navigate his Midwest team to a national championship.
Universal Tennis Ratings provide tennis players worldwide a common scale to determine their level of play. The 16-level scale (from beginners to elite world-class professionals), precisely and reliably determines individual players’ ratings based on actual match results without regard for age, gender or where the matches are played. The Universal Tennis website allows visitors to view more than three million tennis results. College Tennis coaches utilize UTR ratings for recruiting, for scouting opponents, and also to track the levels of their current players. The ITA currently uses UTR ratings to assist with selections and seedings for select regional and national events. www.universaltennis.com
“The UTR program is a valuable asset in our evaluation and scouting of our opponents! UTR is a game changer!”
Gene Orlando
Head Men’s Tennis Coach
“I find the UTR Compare tool beneficial because it holds myself and other college coaches accountable to play fair dual match line ups, and it also helps recruits understand where they would fit into the program’s line up. This addition and the addition of the historical ratings will hold coaches accountable to developing players beyond their initial UTR.”
Audra Cohen
Head Women’s Tennis Coach
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
FIVE WEEKS OF HOT CONTESTS
An experimental junior tennis event sparks excitement in Atlanta
[Reprinted from UniversalTennis.com; By Craig Lambert]
Sure, tennis is thriving in Atlanta—150,000 people play in some type of competitive framework. But even in this tennis boomtown, something was tailing off among junior players. David Stolle, who co-founded Atlanta’s Universal Tennis Academy (UTA) in 1996, could sense it among the organization’s 1,000 junior players, many of whom he helps with college recruiting and placement. “Over the last 10 or 15 years,” he says, “when we set up practice matches, the desire to compete, and the level of effort, had declined. As coaches, how can we stimulate the excitement, even the nervousness, of tournament play in a less structured situation? Today’s kids seem to have a hard time setting up practice matches on their own. We decided to hand them the responsibility for arranging the matches, and find a way to have something riding on every match.”
The academy tried an experiment this spring to accomplish this. It designed a special round-robin tournament that lasted more than a month, from early April until the finals on May 15. Instead of a traditional elimination format, which presents problems like unlucky draws and frequent mismatches, UTA organized 72 junior players ranging from nine to 18 years of age into 18 brackets of four players each. These foursomes were comprised of people who lived fairly near each other.
Skill levels among the 72 entrants varied widely, from those with Universal Tennis Ratings (UTRs) of 2.0 (near beginners) to others above 11.0 (college varsity level). Hence, to produce good matches, the organizers selected groups of four with UTRs all within 1.0 of each other, or as close as possible to that. Age and sex played no part in bracketing. “We had some unbelievable matches as a result,” Stolle recalls. “For example, a 12-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy battled it out for three hours. She finally won it, 6-4 in the third set.”
Indeed, the UTR-based brackets produced loads of close contests: for players with enough data to generate reliable UTRs, 60 percent of matches were competitive. This ratio is consistent with a wealth of research by UTR founder Dave Howell. (UTR’s definition of a competitive match is one whose final score is 6-4, 6-3 or closer.) A high proportion of competitive matches characterizes level-based play, and 60 percent signifies a fiercely contested tournament. Remarkably, that ratio more than doubles, or even triples, rates observed in local junior tournaments in the United States, which commonly find only 20 or 25 percent of their matches reaching the competitive threshold of 6-4, 6-3 or better.
The Atlanta event opened with a month of round-robin play within each bracket. Each entrant had to play a best-of-three-set match against each of the other three in his or her foursome. They had 30 days, or about 10 days per match, to do so, arranging the games themselves and emailing in the results. Naturally, geographical proximity helped in scheduling. “UTR lets you play more matches without having to travel,” says Stolle. “You can spend time and resources on things that matter more.”
For the event’s final weekend, the academy brought the 18 bracket champions to a central location and organized them into seven draws on the basis of UTRs, again ensuring that no one would have to play an opponent more than 1.0 away from them in UTR. Using small elimination draws, they crowned seven champions.
“The event did what it set out to do,” Stolle declares. “There were more competitive matches, the juniors prepared better for their matches and competed better during them. Kids played against people they would not have played otherwise. The majority had a positive experience.” The Academy plans to do a similar event this fall, and twice a year going forward.
The tourney’s success rested in large part on the Academy’s work in educating its members about UTR and preparing them to “think outside the box of how they’d envisioned junior tennis,” says Stolle. Academy staff like tournament assistant Wendy English had many one-on-one conversations as well as email exchanges with players and parents to help them understand the purpose of UTR. They’d also staged previous UTR-driven events. “When you see what UTR does on the court, that solidifies what we’ve been talking about,” says Stolle.
“They [at UTA] have also educated the market in Atlanta as to how important UTR is to college tennis recruiting,” says Randy Jenks, director of events for UTR. Many Atlanta juniors would, of course, like to play college ball, and “the ITA [Intercollegiate Tennis Association] is on board with this,” Stolle observes, adding, “When I talk about a boy to college coaches, the first thing they ask is, ‘What’s his UTR?’ ”
In this regard, Stolle compares a UTR to a golf handicap, which a player can take anywhere and maintain throughout a lifetime of drives, chips, and putts. But in tennis, a regional ranking like #20 in Georgia does not necessarily translate into any known ranking in Massachusetts. UTR, in contrast, is portable worldwide.
Furthermore, when juniors turn 12, 14, or 16, “they don’t age out of anything,” Stolle says. “You don’t have to worry about losing your points, because your UTR continues unchanged. It reflects only your skill, not your age. Tennis is a sport for a lifetime—and UTR is the first system that allows you to have a rating for a lifetime.”
You can visit Universal Tennis Academy’s website at www.utatennis.com or follow them on Facebook, or Twitter.
Sunday, July 31, 2016
USING UTR TO FIND YOUR COLLEGE TENNIS FIT
Hundreds of college tennis coaches use UTRs to assess the level of players from all over the world
[Reprinted from UniversalTennis.com]
Every day, hundreds of US-based college tennis coaches use Universal Tennis Ratings (UTRs) to assess the level of players from all over the world, including you. UTRs have fast become the standard by which a college coach determines if a prospective recruit can play at their team’s competitive level. (You can learn more about what UTRs are all about at www.universaltennis.com and what people are saying about the system here.)
But it works both ways—you can increase your chances of finding the “right fit” with a college tennis team by using the UTR system.
Here’s how
1. Sign up for a Basic UTR subscription. It’s free, and you can get it at www.universaltennis.com
2. Understand your UTR, and how to describe your level of play. Look yourself up on the Universal Tennis system, and make note of your significant match results. Need some help answering “What is your level of play?” Then check out ‘The top 5 questions coaches ask’ article here.
3. Look up the UTRs of players on the college team you have an interest in. We suggest you compare your UTR against the UTRs of starters (probably the top 6 rated players), as well as the UTRs of non-starters.
Take into account how long you have before entering college, as your UTR will go up the more competitive you get. Ask yourself some tough questions. Is it realistic for you to earn a starting spot? Or a spot anywhere on the roster? Could you earn a walk-on spot? Doing your research before writing to coaches will save you – and the coaches – a lot of time.
4. Start communicating with college coaches. Once you find a fit, send the coach an email expressing your interest in joining their team, with your UTR in the subject line. The coach will know immediately if you’re at a competitive level that could help their team.
5. If being recruited for a starting spot on the squad is not realistic, tell the coach your UTR and ask about the coach’s policy for walk-ons. Do they offer a walk-on tryout tournament? Ask the coach if the size of the team roster is limited due to indoor practice space. Does the college have a club tennis team? If so, why not ask for the contact info for the club tennis captains?
The USTA Tennis On Campus program provides an option for those that wish to play recreational collegiate tennis through college club tennis teams and intramural tennis programs. Get more details at www.tennisoncampus.com
Revving up your college search
Although the free version of UTR allows you to compare your rating with other players, including those that currently play on college teams, the advanced tools bundled with a Premium UTR subscription do all this much more easily.
Here’s how to use some of the power tools found on the Universal Tennis system:
1. Sign up for one of the Premium UTR subscription options found at www.universaltennis.com (For this article, we’ll be using tools available with Premium Plus UTR subscription.)
2. As soon as you sign into the Universal Tennis system as a Premium Plus subscriber, you’ll notice that your UTR is more precise. You will now be able to see UTR values with two decimal places, and notice how your own UTR changes from day to day — hopefully in an upwards direction as you continue to improve your tennis game.
3. Search for college teams that are at your UTR level. If you hope to be starter on your new team, why not look at schools where your level is within the range of a college team’s top six players. You can quickly do this search by using the UTR system’s Advanced Search. If you have a UTR of 10.25, adjust the Power 6 UTR Spread to search for teams between 10 and 11.
The UTR Power 6™ Rating calculates the sum of the six highest, most reliable player ratings for each college team. The Power 6™ Rating and the Power 6™ UTR Spread are great measuring tools to help you prequalify for college teams of interest based on your competitive level fit. However, UTRs and their order of ratings do not imply nor compete with college tennis player or team rankings, as these rankings are determined by different factors. Also, the Power 6™ UTR Rating does not imply nor suggest an actual college team lineup.
4. Fine tune your search of schools by selecting where you might like to play. There are search filters for division (NCAA DI, DII, DIII, NAIA, NJCAA, and California CC), conference, state, and city.
5. Have a favorite college search you wish to use in the future? Then save it to your Universal Tennis system dashboard. Players’ UTRs will fluctuate based on how well they compete. In some cases, new players within the team’s roster may not have a 100% reliable UTR. Those UTRs will change as players get more matches processed by the Universal Tennis system. You can quickly see updated UTRs with your saved searches when you return to the Universal Tennis system at any time in the future.
6. Of course, you can also save all your favourite college teams you want to follow to your UTR dashboard as well.
You can learn more about the latest Premium Plus UTR features here.
Starting off with a free Basic UTR subscription is easy, and happens at www.universaltennis.com/free-registration.aspx
If you discover other ways to use the Universal Tennis system to assist with your college recruiting efforts, please share them with others by adding your comments below this post.
You can also join our UTR Google+ Community to get future college tennis recruiting tips here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)