User talk:Drcraiglambert

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Craig Lambert references
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Your Post 2/6/18
Drcraiglambert,

Thank you for your questions regarding my edit to the UTR article.

First off my wife and I are very strong supporters of what we believe is the intent of UTR. We play almost exclusively mixed tennis because we enjoy each other as partners, and advocate for anything that improves the quality and accessibility to playing options.

Regarding my source - well that would be you. Not you in the literal sense, but you in that my information comes from UTR. In November of 2017 I noticed that UTR began pulling men's and women's USTA matches into the calculations. Unfortunately the UTR wasn't (and I believe still isn't) using the results of USTA Mixed Doubles matches. This troubles me for several reasons, not the least is that we play a lot of mixed tennis in USTA as well as captain teams. Our ratings would be much more accurate and complete if mixed doubles was included, especially since we were under the impression that the entire point of UTR was to put everyone one the same spectrum with regards to ratings - men and women play together, but you don't use the results of mixed matches (but men/men and women/women are fine).

So I contacted Universal Tennis through your website and asked the question:

"I'm wondering why Mixed matches aren't in the calculation when men/women league matches are? Please work towards capturing these matches as well."

Universal Tennis responded:

"We would like to import mixed doubles matches but we are not able to because TennisLink does not list the gender of the players and that information is required by our system for player identification purposes."

I followed up with the following:

"That's pretty unfortunate for somebody who plays as much mixed as we do, especially given that the appeal of UTR is that it isn't gender based (so why does gender matter)."

In which Universal Tennis replied:

"Gender matters for player identification purposes in our system and because the rating scale for women only goes up to 13 but for men it goes up to 16."

In addition to this email exchange. I have my own experience in that when my wife and I played our first UTR tournament, neither of us had a UTR rating or account. We registered, played the tournament together, and when the matches posted - my rating was 1-point higher than my wife's rating. Same matches, same opponents, no other matches in the calculation - higher rating for the man.

I'd love to be wrong, but don't believe I am.

EquityAdvocate (talk) 00:27, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Hi EquityAdvocate

First let me say that it's good to connect with a player who shares the philosophy that we at UTR hold, one of offering a fair, accurate index that applies to all tennis players--men, women, and children—and rates everyone the same way, without any distinctions based on age, gender, or nationality.

I have now shared your message with a knowledgeable colleague at UTR and can clarify matters for you. First of all, the ratings for men and women are calculated using the exact same formula. Our rating system is purely data driven. There is no immutable "cap" on the upper limit of any player's rating. As an empirical matter, however, to date, no female player has achieved a UTR as high as 13.50, based (and solely based) on her match performances, and no male has achieved one as high as 16.50. In theory, at some future time it's possible that such so-far-unseen ratings, or even higher ones, might be achieved by some truly outstanding athlete. The fact that Roger Federer currently has a UTR of 16.18 and Serena Williams is at 13.26 will give you an idea of just how outstanding that player would need to be. The sentences that you added to the UTR Wikipedia page are, unfortunately, incorrect, and to avoid confusing readers with misinformation, I will delete them from the Wiki text.

Regarding the ratings of you and your wife, I can advise you that our doubles rating is still in the beta (testing) phase and we are trying to make some improvements to it. The discrepancy in your ratings is not because we are deliberately rating the female players lower.