A BRIEF HISTORY OF UNIVERSAL TENNIS RATINGS by Darryl Cummings

The Universal Tennis Rating® (UTR®) was created in Norfolk, VA in 2006. My friend and mentor since the early 1980’s, Dave Howell created the idea of the UTR. Dave has always had an exceptional creative player development tennis mind. He has coached a USTA National Champion and Easter Bowl Champion, as well as many players who have had successful collegiate careers.

I often talk to Dave when I am driving. For multiple weeks in 2006, during our phone calls he would discuss a tournament structure he was using at that time.  Dave was a teaching pro and frequent tournament director.  Dave and I knew that “good” tennis tournaments were those in which several players had “good” matches. Since there is almost no benefit to either the winner nor the loser in any match in which one player clobbers the other, Dave was of the opinion that a universal metric was needed in order to identify “good” matches and “good” tournaments.  He and a former player, Miguel Rosa, were, at that time, organizing tournaments using the “Competitive Threshold®” model, which Dave had created, in order to provide players with good matches.  

When I asked what the “competitive threshold” was, he answered, “One more than half of the total games needed to win a match”.  Correspondingly, any match in which the losing player reaches the Competitive Threshold is considered to be a “competitive” match.  Yep, it took a while for that to sink in.

Dave made it simple for me when he explained that the score of 6-3,6-4 is the competitive threshold for a 2-out-3 set match. And any match that is at least as close as that is considered to be a “competitive” match. He and Miguel would organize the tournaments with the goal that, in at least 50% of the matches, the losing players would reach the competitive threshold.  

In order to accomplish that goal, it was necessary to limit individual tournaments’ participants to groups of players who played at, more or less, the same level.  Dave determined that every tennis player—from the lowest beginner to the highest-level professional player– can be grouped into one of sixteen playing levels.  This was the beginning of the 16-level Universal Tennis Ratings scale; and tournaments for players of any particular UTR groupings came to be called “UTR Events”.

My sons (Clark Cummings and Connor Cummings) first tournament experience was competing in a UTR 1 event.

After discussing this with Dave for a couple of months, during a phone call with him I went into a proactive mode and suggested to Dave that we create a business around the new rating system.

I communicated to him that I had multiple former collegiate players in Norfolk who, collectively, had the skill set to help us start this business. He agreed, and I went into recruiting mode. I had three former players who are sisters from Brazil (Luciana Araujo, Raquel Araujo, and Patricia Araujo). Each one of them had married a former collegiate player of mine. Luciana married Johan Varverud from Sweden; Raquel married Niclas Kohler from Sweden; and Patricia married Alexandre Cancado from Brazil. They were all living and working in Norfolk, VA.

Together, the seven of us (Luciana did not get directly involved in the business) formally formed Universal Tennis, LLC in 2006. Niclas and Johan had start-up business experience. Patricia was a graphic designer. Raquel was a programmer. Alexandre was the company’s website designer and would spend over 2000 hours creating the original UTR algorithm and setting up the database of players and results… all while maintaining his full-time job at his own software development company.  All seven of these team members, including myself, played tennis at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA… where I was also the Head Tennis Coach from 1992 to 2011. All of us except Dave are members of Norfolk Yacht & Country Club.

Not too long after the company was formed, Steve Clark was added to the team. Steve was also a member of Norfolk Yacht and Country Club, where the two of us had been playing doubles together every week for a few of years. He and Dave had already established a relationship. Steve, a University of Virginia educated professional engineer who is also licensed to practice patent law before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, had been running his own engineering and intellectual property business for years.  With a hands-on background in virtually all matters relating to new product development, protection and commercialization, Steve’s experience was invaluable to the team. In most meetings Dave and I would do most of the talking, and after we finished talking we would look at Steve. Dave taught me that whoever the speakers looks at first right after they finish talking is usually the smartest person in the room. Yep, it was Steve… although Steve would surely disagree with this assessment.  

In 2012, I connected another former Old Dominion collegiate tennis player, Salman Bader, with Dave Howell. Salman, who at that time was a graduate student at ODU, joined the team to help Dave manage the ever-growing task of data importation to the UTR database.

I had always thought college tennis would be the hub of the Universal Tennis Rating. The ratings would make the recruiting process much more efficient for all concerned parties—coaches, players and players’ parents, alike. In 2010 I had shared the UTR information with Dave Fish (the men’s head tennis coach for Harvard University).  Despite the fact that a year earlier Fish had authored a comprehensive white paper titled “The Need for a National Rating System”, it took him some time to embrace UTR. It was helpful that the Old Dominion tennis program had achieved national success during this time, and Fish eventually came to fully embrace UTR.

In 2012, Dave Howell and Steve Clark met in Athens, Georgia with the Executive Director of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (the governing body of varsity college tennis in the U.S.).  At that meeting, Dave Howell and Steve, with Dave Fish’s endorsement, negotiated a breakthrough agreement between UT and the ITA under which the ITA authorized UT to upload all college match scores to the UTR database, and under which the ITA agreed to encourage all college coaches to actively “make full use of” Universal Tennis Ratings “wherever and whenever possible”.  With the execution of this watershed agreement (the first of many between the ITA and UT), UTR was now well on its way to becoming the predominant tennis player rating system used by American college tennis coaches.

The following year (2013), Dave Howell and Steve negotiated another breakthrough agreement… this time with the Northern California Section of the United States Tennis Association (Norcal-USTA). Under that agreement Norcal-USTA agreed to send all of their match results to the UTR database, and Universal Tennis agreed to publish ratings for all Norcal-USTA tennis players on the UTR website.  With this important agreement (the first of several between the USTA and UT), UTR was now well on its way to becoming widely used by junior players throughout the United States.

Within a few more months, Dave Howell and Steve had also negotiated an agreement with Tennis Canada, the governing body for tennis in that country.  Under that agreement, Tennis Canada agreed to export their members’ match results to the UTR database, and Universal Tennis agreed to publish ratings for Tennis Canada members’ ratings on the UTR website.  With that agreement, UTR had achieved its first beachhead on foreign soil, and it became just a matter of time before other countries’ tennis organizations started to take notice of UTR.

Once Fish and Howell were connected to each other, UTR went to a new level.  In late 2013 the company was reorganized, and a board of managers was formed comprising Clark, Howell and Fish; and, a few months later Steve Clark closed up his engineering and intellectual property consulting practice and became UT’s first full-time employee (as its Chief Operating Officer and Lead Ratings Specialist).  Later, Dave Howell came onboard full-time as the company’s Lead Competition Analyst, and Salman Bader became the company’s Lead Data Manager.

Within a few short years, Universal Tennis had now grown to have over 35,000 subscribers to the UTR website, and its match database had grown to include over four million match results for nearly 600,000 players from all over the world.  Today Universal Tennis Ratings are widely recognized as the gold standard for tennis player ratings, and UTR is now being used by the USTA, the ITA, the NCAA, and the Tennis Channel, and by players and coaches throughout the world.

In November of 2017 the new CEO, March Leschly, Managing Partner of Iconica Partners out of Palo Alto, California, took over ownership and control of the company, with investors Mark Hurd (CEO of Oracle), Ken Solomon (President of Tennis Channel), Major League Baseball, LA Dodgers Investment group and others.

ABOUT UTR: Universal Tennis,LLC is the company behind the Universal Tennis Rating, or “UTR”, a revolutionary player rating system that provides a single, unifying language and standard for tennis players across ages, geographies and genders. As the leading algorithm-based system for competitive tennis players, UTR has already experienced rapid grassroots adoption across college and junior levels worldwide.  A tennis player’s UTR is a number, between 1.00 and 16.50, that accurately and objectively indicates that player’s level of play. The company’s vision is to unify tennis for everyone by bringing cutting edge analytics and community based technology to tennis players worldwide, independent of level. UTR uniquely allows anyone to measure, identify and track their level of play relative to other players, while also providing tools for coaches and organizers to run UTR Powered Events that are level based rather than age or gender driven. Today the UTR system is powered by over 6 million match results, across 600 thousand players in nearly 200 countries. To learn more about UTR, please visit www.MyUTR.com.