Iowa HS Tennis, BOYS ONLY, is joining the likes of Texas, Colorado and other states in having match results entered into Universal Tennis Rating (UTR). Starting right now, boys coaches can now put match results into UTR from the season.
The IAHSAA Boys Tennis advisory committee had been looking for a better way to seed players when there is not a common opponent during postseason play.
Head Boys Tennis Coach and boys tennis committee member, TJ Cox, of West Des Moines Valley was able to talk more on where the direction that the committee is looking to go with getting high school match results into UTR. "This will be another tool in terms of postseason seeding, not the end all be all. Head to head record and common opponents will still be the strongest seeding factor like it has been. UTR would also be a way to house postseason tournament brackets/results for faster and easier score reporting for fans. We were able to poll the boys coaches around the state and had nearly a 70% approval from responding coaches and good feedback on moving ahead with this."
Other states such as Colorado and Texas to name a few, have been getting their high school match results entered into UTR over the last few years. These other states have a central location where high school results are entered (such as Bound that we use in Iowa), and have that data sent over to UTR each week. Right now per the boys tennis committee, match results would need to be entered directly by the coaches into UTR, along with uploading to Bound like they already do.
"Many coaches are willing to enter scores in both places (Bound and UTR)" said Cox. "We are working with Bound in the hopes of having a weekly score export to UTR and be able to move the process of coaches just entering results into Bound, and then get into UTR from that direction."
Bound has stated that there is not a concrete decision on their end yet for if this is something that is viable in terms of the data portion, however, they have been approached by the IAHSAA and have had conversations in the past few weeks and months. Bound is open to doing this from an overall perspective.
Iowa High School players will need to claim or create their profile on UTR.
Coaches will need activate their school and then can add players to their roster.
This is a big step in the right direction, but that being said, I have some positive talking points and a few concerns with how this is getting going from the start.
A LOT more players will now have a UTR. UTR is the premier site for college coaches in their early stages of recruiting as the ratings give an idea of where a players ability level is at. As there are a lot of players here in Iowa that do not play in the summer/offseason, all of those players will now be able to still have a rating because of the high school matches. To me this also alludes back to a talking point I had in a previous article about playing or not playing college tennis, where a lot of people do not think they are good enough to play in college. The beauty of UTR and having a rating is you can see how you stack up to college teams in the country and where you may fall in their lineup. There is truly a team for anyone that wants to continue playing, and I think this will help keep more players moving on to compete in college.
On the other side of things, there are a few things that I am concerned about as this all gets started. The fact that this is BOYS ONLY right now is not good. I like that the boys coaches are willing and being active to keep making things better for the sport here in Iowa, and it's disappointing that the a lot of the girls coaches are against this. A main reason I have been hearing about why the girls coaches are not in favor of this is that one, in using UTR to help determine seeding, players who have summer tournament results could sway things in seeding discussions.
I completely disagree with the girls coaches who are citing these reasons to resist. As the boys committee stated, H2H and common opponents are the main seeding factors as they have been, and UTR can be another late factor if things are really close. If they think summer results could sway things, yeah not really. The ones who play summer tournaments and play year round are the better players anyway and the ones who will be in the conversation for seeding. They are the ones who will be winning most of their HS matches. The more you play or practice something, the better you get at it.
My other main concern is that this isn't starting off with Bound from the beginning. As I said above, Bound has been approached by the IAHSAA and has had some conversations together. This is the most logical and efficient way to get results into UTR, from one central location. Again, I am not speaking for Bound on if they will or will not provide this for Iowa HS Tennis or not down the road, but I am hopeful it will work out. There are still a ton of HS coaches in Iowa that don't enter their results into Bound, so why would they enter results in a second spot when they don't even enter them in the first spot? It would be nice to have it all in an organized manner from the start instead of being chopped up with different sectors pulling different ways. I am a big fan of this happening, don't get me wrong. Only wish to see it uniform from all angles!
-Iowa HS Tennis
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