Although tennis is enormously popular around the world, there was never a common rating system for it, as, for example, golf has, with its ‘handicap. In tennis, players usually enter events in their particular geographic area. As such, their ‘ranking’’ has meaning only within a particular geographic area. Furthermore, there are thousands of ‘ranking’ systems in tennis, which assign athletes a spot relative to all others ranked in that system, but there are very few ‘rating’ systems, and even so, none that are universally recognised - until now.
Universal Tennis Rating (UTR) has taken the world by storm, as it is a global rating system that rates each player on a single, standard metric, irrespective of age, gender and geography. The rating is automatically generated by an algorithm developed by Oracle. Its goal is to produce an objective, consistent, and accurate index of players’ skills, without regard to age, gender, nationality, or the geographic location of a particular match.
All professional players in the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) now have UTRs.
The good news is that UTR has just been launched in Sri Lanka, with former national champion, Davis Cup player and ATP ranked professional, Renouk Wijemanne, as the local Coordinator. Wijemanne currently heads the National High Performance Programme at the Sri Lanka Tennis Association (SLTA) as well.