Page 74 - Tennis Magazine April 2019

Steve Johnson was the highest-ranked ATP pro to enter the
269-player California Championships. But the winner of the event,
which included players as young as 8 years of age, was Sam Querrey,
whose UTR of 15.46 was the highest in the field.
The rating doesn’t take playing
surface into account, nor a player’s
surface proficiency. Also, while UTR
is blind to gender and age, a lack of
crossover play influences the rat-
ings. Serena Williams held a rating of
13.28 at the start of 2019. She was
ranked No. 16 by the WTA, but rated
No. 2—a whisker behind then-WTA
No. 1 Simona Halep—in UTR. That
isn’t even in the Top 150 among
men’s UTR ratings.
For Williams to significantly imp-
rove her UTR, she would have to do
well against more highly rated play-
ers—she would have to play men.
That notwithstanding, UTR has
already been an age and gender
barrier-busting technology. At most
levels, the ratings produce competi-
tive matchups. If you’re a UTR 6.0,
you can expect a good match against
a woman who plays Division III col-
legiate tennis, a man with an NTRP of
4.0, a woman with an NTRP of 4.5 or
a boys’ USTA sectional 14-and under
7 2 T E N N I S . C O M M A R /A P R 2 0 1 9
contender. Pairing a senior player
against a youngster of the same UTR
can provide an objective lesson in
maturity. That points to the over-
arching potential value of UTR as a
tool for community building.
Leschly didn’t acquire UTR and
attract his string of heavy-hitting
investors just because he wanted to
give tennis a handicapping system.
He plans to make UTR a platform for
a full range of tennis-related activi-
ties, from shopping to tournament
“We’re not here
to change the
ATP or WTA
rankings. Theirs
is based on point
accumulation.
Ours is different.”
entry and social interaction. Think of
Leschly as the Mark Zuckerberg of
tennis, but 16 years older and wear-
ing a white polo instead of a hoodie.
The advantage Leschly’s company
may have over other digital ten-
nis platforms is UTR itself. Players
will gather because of the common
rating system, and from there, a rac-
quet or tickets will be a click away.
“We want to build a very large
platform and become a destination
where people can engage digitally,”
he says. “This is the Yelp, the
OpenTable of tennis.”
The effort is bearing fruit. The
California Championships was a
landmark event, but it wasn’t a one-
off experiment. A UTR community
engagement platform was rolled out
last July, featuring a fully-integrated
tournament and event management
system, and it has already been the
host for 1,800 UTR events.
Perhaps the acronym should stand
for Universal Tennis Revolution.