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The podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. We are here to help you achieve your pickleball goals, with a focus on the mental part of your game. Our mission is to share with you a positive and more healthy way of engaging with pickleball. Together let’s forge a stronger relationship with the sport we all love. With the added benefit of playing better pickleball too. No matter what you are trying to accomplish in your pickleball journey, Pickleball Therapy is here to encourage and support you.
Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your Pickleball improvement. I'm your host, Tony Roy. This is a special episode of the podcast. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about ratings. Ratings is one of those areas that players often have questions about in terms of how do I get rated, what does rating mean, things like that.
And in this episode, we had the opportunity to sit down with Mark Lesley. He's the CEO of UTR Sports. UTR Sports has been in the ratings game for a long time. They jumped into Pickleball not too long ago, but they've already made a lot of headway. And in fact, they have an agreement with USA Pickleball to be the standard for ratings in the Pickleball space.
And also they're also working with the a PP one of the major tours in terms of the rating system that's gonna be utilized. During this episode. We talk about, you know, why to get rated, understanding better the rating system, you know, in other words, how the rating works to determine the level of a player. And it's a really good episode.
If you're either a tournament player, you're playing league, you play at a facility that uses levels, or you're just curious about ratings, you vote, you know, make curious about 'em for yourself and how they impact the, the level at which you play. In other words, like the group in which you play and the environment at which you play is a really good interview with Mark and he sheds a lot of light on the subject.
Before we jump into the interview, if you're listening to this podcast around the time of its release, you're still have time to join us inside our Pickleball Academy or Better Pickleball Academy for one of our live game studies. I am conducting three myself, three live game studies where I'm gonna walk you through some match play, show you what's good and what could be better.
So you wanna join us for that. I'll put a link in the show notes. With that said, let's go ahead and jump into the podcast. Mark, it's a pleasure to have you on the Pickleball Therapy podcast. How you doing today? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Tony. It's great to be Here. Looks like, looks like a beautiful part of the world you're in.
So we're gonna, folks, if you're watching us on our YouTube channel, you get to see the beauty of the, the area behind Mark, which is all simulated. It's all, it's all, I'm kidding, but it's a beautiful be Thing, California. Yeah, check it out. Mark. Let's, I'm gonna dive right into this subject. 'cause ratings is one of these areas where,
you know, it, it's, it's, it's difficult for players, right? I mean there's, there's a lot of different rating things that they hear about. Let's dive right into rating. Let's talk a little bit about, you know, I'm a Pickleball player, let's say a hypothetical Pickleball player. Why should I care about a rating? Just talk about that a little bit.
Yeah, so look, when you talk about ratings and you talk about rankings, you know, there's all continuum of players, right? There's sort of people that come into a sport, they're people that do it recreationally, then maybe they get a little bit more competitive, maybe they want to go into tournaments. The whole basis of a rating and the ranking for that matter is to understand what level you're at so that you can create level based play.
So no matter what level you're at, like it's fun to be on a court with people that are your level. So you enjoy the experience. So the whole premise of this, and the whole reason for having a rating is if it's accurate. And that's the key word. If it's accurate, it creates a great experience for the player. It allows organizers to better organize everything else.
I think we've had a situation in the sport where the ratings haven't been sufficiently accurate and it's created a fair bit of turmoil, it's created frustration. And as a result, the whole notion of creating more fun and better level based play has been absent. I, I, I couldn't agree with you more. I've been at the sport about eight years and you know,
we hear about like, you know, there's always been differences of ratings, like a four, oh, in Florida it's not the same as a four. Oh, in another state, you know, you, you come to a tournament like a big, we just finished the US open here in Naples and you know, it used to be maybe some intentional,
some unintentional sort of sandbagging thing where like players are playing at different levels than they should be. And some of it may just be accidental. So I would agree that some consistency would be better. Now my understanding is that the, the company that you're with, and we'll talk a little bit about the, the USA Pickleball announcement that you all just made,
I think it was last week, but the background of the company that you're with is it has years of doing this in tennis as I understand it, correct? Yeah. So our business, UUTR sports was really built initially around creating a rating ranking system for tennis. And so in tennis, the exact same challenge existed, which was, yeah, how do you put people onto a tennis court?
'cause you're competing against each other. It's not like you go play golf, you compete against the course. And how do you ultimately create a system that allows you to understand truly what level you're at so that when you go onto the court now you're not just playing your buddies, you can play across age, you can play across gender, you can play across geography.
And now no matter where you are, you can say, ah, that person is at my level, I'm gonna have a fun experience. We built that company up over the last six years. The original rating system we built in tennis was actually started more than a decade ago. We've been perfecting that. We built other rating systems in tennis. Those are proliferated globally now for all levels.
So color ball, early kids, juniors, even at the pro ranks. And then about a year and a half ago we turned our team towards Pickleball and have now developed what we think is by far the best in breed capability and system for rating and ranking Pickleball players. And you know, we're based in Silicon Valley, we're a technology data science company.
We have 150, all we do is technology and data science. So, you know, we'd like to consider ourselves the world experts on ratings and rankings. And we're super excited being Pickleball now. That's awesome. So it sounds like, you know, you're transition, you've transitioned, not transitioned, you've transitioned your knowledge and your skillsets that you've perfected in tennis.
Now you've brought 'em over to Pickleball and are applying them in the Pickleball space. Can you tell us a little bit about, you need go as detail as you want or as broad as you want, but a little bit about the, the how a how the rating system works. You know, does it work based on, like, are you guys using it based on like point results and matches?
Or is it based on overall results? Just a little bit of that. Yeah, so the way our system works is that there's sort of a multi-tier to our system. So if you're coming in and you're fresh and you're new and whether you've never been rated or you're coming into our system, we actually provide you with a couple questions to give you a provisional rating,
right? So anchor you, that's just a putting you into the ecosystem. It's somewhere around 70 to 80% accurate, right? Based, based on a handful of questions. So it's good enough to sort of say, Hey look, where do you fall in this spectrum? Our system runs from one to 10. So it's a little bit of a broader scale than what people are more accustomed to now,
which is the shorter scale. And the reason we had to do that was we wanted to create enough accuracy and separation, particularly to early parts of, of, of the player base. And so when you come in, you get a P one through P five, which is provisional one through five. And that kind of can anchor you then as you start to play.
So whether you're self posting scores or you're playing in tournaments. And then we'll talk about the differences in those two. 'cause it's very important, you will now start to have scores in and you will develop a numerical rating. So your provisional rating will flip over into a numerical rating. And when it comes to numerical rating, and this is a very, very important point,
is that there's two versions of this. There's what we call verified play, which is an event that's organized. It's got a set of rules, it's USAP events, it's an a PP event, it's an organizer sitting on a platform. It's, it's something where it's monitored play, that's what we call verified play. And you can have an objective rating that's purely based on,
call it sanctioned play, although sanctioned means a lot of things to different people. And then there's something called unverified play where let's say you and I go out and play and we post a score and that can come into our system. So you can have a verified rating, okay? Or you can have an unverified rating. Your unverified rating will cover everything.
But it has this element of subjectivity in it and it has the, the possibility of manipulation in it. So you play golf if you live in Florida, Tony, you've hit a golf ball somewhere along in your lifetime, right? Well, you know, golf, you can play a tournament and you can post your own score. So this whole notion of sandbagging,
the notion of being able to manipulate your index, you know, hopefully there's a threshold of integrity. Say, look, this is where I am. But inevitably people will skew it. That exists in Pickleball today. It exists with duper. You can manipulate your duper rating by virtue of entering scores, by virtue of playing Sunday afternoon by virtue of eliminating tournaments.
You know, there's a handful of different tricks that you can play with your duper rating if you want to. What we've created is a system that can cater to anybody entering the sport. It caters to anybody who wants to just play social and recreationally and don't want to be involved in tournaments, but wanna have a sense of what level they're at. And then we have something that's purely objective so that when it comes to A-U-S-A-P we'll talk about in a minute,
or it comes to a PP or toxic people really wanna be competitive. And by the way, competitive can be at any level, right? But if you wanna really have a reliable rating, we have an objective measure that that stands above approach and stands above manipulation, which is something that's new and different, right? And then underlying all of that, of course is the best possible data science based on,
hey, we have a scoring format in the sport, it's a point system. How do we optimize this to make the scores that are entered, the number of scores we look at the differential and the points create an outcome and does the most reliable possible rating relative to the other players in the universe. Make sense? Sounds, Sounds, sounds pretty thorough.
Mark, appreciate the, the, the rundown on it. Lemme ask you a follow-up question though, on the one through 10. So Will is the, is the whole range used of one through 10? Is it, or is it like the Olympics where like, you know, you fall on your face in gymnastics, you get like 9.7. So like,
you know, the first numbers in gym, in gymnastics or scoring don't matter, right? It's like 9.6 or higher or something. So were you using all the way through 10? Yeah, so, so the way, so, so there, there are two types of systems, right? There's what we call an absolute system and a relative system. An absolute system is something like a ranking system where you go play a,
a pro tour, you get a certain number of ranking points depending on how far you get in the round. So a PP has a ranking system, right? For their tour. That's called an absolute system. It's absolute number of points, right? And so you accumulate points, what we do with a rating system is what we call it a relative system,
right? So it's got a scale of one to 10 and then all the results come in and every 24 hours the entire system is updated relative to everybody else in that ecosystem, right? So this notion that the best player in the world could be a 9.21 month and it could be a 9.3 the next month because everything is adjusting continuously, but it is truly from one to 10.
The rule of thda you can use, and we'll talk about USAP right now as we've moved the scale a little bit higher, we're roughly one number different than us a's existing system, right? So if you are a four or five in USA's current system, you would be a a a 5.5 in our system that's roughly a benchmark. Now, obviously with more accuracy and with more details and everything else,
right? So it's a little bit of a mental adjustment, right? 'cause people have gotten used to talking about, oh, I'm a three five, I'm a four five now we're gonna change the system. And people are gonna be like, ah, you know, what does it mean, Mark? You're gonna be, you're gonna be the most popular guy in Pickleball in a in whenever that happens.
They're gonna hate me for a while. No, they're not, not the players. Oh my god. When players can say, you, you made me a five five overnight. That's the, that's the magic overnight, right? And, and, and I'll tell you one thing that I really like about what you're saying is because I, you know,
we've been, you know, we're Primarily our role is primarily as coaches, right? So, and we get asked questions all the time about like, you know, like I'm a 3.5, I want to be 4.0 right? And so players get frustrated 'cause they're stuck in 3.5. But what they don't see is like there's three five and then there's three six and then there's 3.63,
3.71. Those are very different. You know, like a 3 7 2, a true 3 7 2 player yeah. Plays very different than a 3, 5, 5 player. You know what I mean? In terms of like their, their skill set is, it can be vastly different. Same thing in 4.0 in 4.0. And I, you know, I came from tennis a a as well and I believe you have a tennis background I mask for about a second.
But you know, and in tennis like, you know, you play 4.0 and there's like vast difference in players at 4.0. You know, so if we could be a little bit more precise, right? Because now four oh is a tighter band, right? And then, you know, the ones that need to be four fives, that's a tighter band as opposed to having like all these players thrown in between three oh and four.
Oh there's like, I don't know what the number is, but it's a gazillion players in that height band, you know? Yeah. And it's better for their psyche I think. 'cause they can, players can move up in, in increments that mentally they can process easier than like 3.53 and 3.82 or something like that, you know? So yeah, I mean look,
the all premise is to try to create an accurate measure where you are and then whatever your appetite or interest or ambition may be, you know, you now have a, a system that should be accurate reflect, hey, what do I gotta do to move up? So if you're a coach and here's a player at three five and they're deploying certain types of shots and strategies on the court and say,
look, you wanna be a four oh player, here's some of the things that you have to now be able to do because a four oh player is actually able to execute on these certain types of things, speaking generically. Now it may be that part of their game, they're a five oh player and part of their game, they're a two five player,
right? Like, so like, you know, there's always a little bit of that. But, but that is really at the core of having a baseline and, and then saying, okay, now what do I want out of the sport? And how does this system support that journey? And this is what we've done incredibly well in other sports, specifically tennis,
where now, you know, the accuracy having come in to Pickleball, we started to develop our system working very closely with the A PP. So over the last year and change. And, and so as we took all of their results and all their tour and all their recreational players, and by the way, if you played a PP you have a rating in our system,
you can go to our website, okay? And if you played a series of a PP events, you can go in and you can just claim your profile for free. Right? And by the way, our rating is free and it's always gonna be free. That's the other thing. So let's be clear about that. So we're trying to create a system and a standard and a currency in a language to support the sport.
But that rating we've created now is more accurate than the a PP rankings. So, so we've already shown, so a a, a good rating system is always gonna be more accurate than a ranking system. And the reason is that you can play really well in one or two events and then play really poorly. But because you earned a bunch of points over here,
you know, on that absolute scale right? Doesn't necessarily reflect how well you're playing now. Right? And so, and those points tend to stay on for a year. So you play really well in the first six months or vice versa, right? Whereas the rating is a continuous 24 hour measure of how well are you competing. Gotcha. Right? Yeah,
that makes a lot of sense. I'm gonna have to go check it out now, now I'm curious. I'm like, There go, lemme Lemme ask you a question mark on this and let's talk a little bit about, let's go ahead and talk about USA Pickleball 'cause I wanna ask you some more questions about that. So the way I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong,
is that UTRP, which is your organization, is now the exclusive Ratings Agency or company with USA Pickleball and also the A PP. Is that fair? Or Is So we don't, we don't like to say the word exclusive. Alright. All right. All right. The word gets people up in arms, right? So, so, so our view is that look,
we, we are the standard, we're the preferred rating system. We are the anchor system for both of those entities. And what we built now is the capability and the foundation from which the sport can grow with them, with our system. So that's correct. And then more broadly, what we've also done is we've also partnered with them to enable all their tournament immense leagues and recreational activities.
So our companies much more than the rating system. You know, we're not duper in the sense of just having created a rating system, right? Like what we've done is we look, a rating system is a means to an end. The end is figuring out how to activate a good player experience, help organizers get the tools out there. And as a sport,
we're very, very early in the penetration of getting technologies to help the sport, right? Most people just drop into a facility, they just enjoy themselves. Wonderful. Most people don't really want a rating. Most people don't really know why they should have a rating. We've just discussed why. Right? And I think as, as time now goes on,
you know, as we are in this digital age, we're saying, look, here are tools and technologies that can help you. And, and, and by the way, almost all of these are gonna be free, right? So like this, this whole notion of saying, look, we're trying to digitally connect people, create a better experience, help organizers enjoy the sport better as the infrastructure gets built out in this sport.
And we get more and more facilities, more and more courts as people travel more, as this whole notion of leagues now starts to come into the sport. 'cause it's really been primarily tournaments up until this point. You know, there's other form factors that are coming into the sport that hopefully can enrich the experience and, and allow this sport to continue to grow and excel.
You know, 'cause unlike others, this who might say otherwise, this sport's here to stay, right? This is a fun, wonderful sport, you know? And it brings such pleasure to so many people. It's a healthy lifestyle despite some of those injuries that we're hearing about. But, you know, it's, it's a wonderful, wonderful sport. Yeah.
I'll tell you, I came, as I mentioned to you, I came from, you know, tennis from a child, you know, small child playing tennis tournaments my whole life. And me and my wife met playing tennis and have not looked back since we got introduced to Pickleball. I, I view Pickleball as I look at, look at it historically,
you know, you had the original tennis play back in the 15 hundreds and you have long tennis, which was the sport you and I play in 10 on. And everybody, we play tennis, that's what we play. And Pickleball is just the next step in that evolution. You know, IIII have nothing against tennis. I love tennis, you know,
I still watch it. My kids play it, my dad plays it. You know, I'm, I'm a fan of it, but it's just, it is what it is. So I lemme Ask you, well you, you don't have to look at it as one or the other. It's, it's sort of like, hey listen, you can play tennis and you can play Pickleball.
It's a totally different game, right? It has different needs, different demands, et cetera. I, I played junior college and professional tennis. My wife sucked me into Pickleball. I've loved it. I'm actually gonna play in my first major tournament in New York at the a PP and you know, so I'm gonna, I'm trying to sign up there for the senior pro division.
I've actually been playing a lot. So we'll see how good my game is. But like, I'm all in, you know, I'm loving this, you know, I'm playing Pickleball every day now. I love it. I hope to see you up there. I'll be up there. I'm playing on Thursday at the Team Cup event and then I, I'm,
I'm there on Friday just hanging out with some friends and that, we have a camp there a couple days, so good. That'll be fun. Be fun. So yeah, well welcome to Pickleball, I guess, and, and New York will be interesting for you 'cause I don't, I haven't looked at the bracket, but hopefully, I'm sure there's some really good players that'll be up there,
so you'll get to experience. Oh yeah, we'll see. I mean, by the way, that's another fascinating thing about this sport. I mean, you know, you got 250 divisions in this sport, right? Like you, you know, and, and what I love about it's like age level, you know, you know, gender, it,
it, it's, so this whole whole notion of, of segmentation in to allow people to have a good experience, right? Well, what's need is, you need a good rating system in that and a ranking system, right? Otherwise, what's the point, right? Like, you know, if if you got a national champion in the three five,
but they're really a four five player, then well that doesn't smell right, right. You know? Right. So, but now lemme Ask you, speaking of segmentation, you mentioned, you know, we, we talking about a bigger, potentially bigger, not potentially we're talking about a, a bigger scale, right? From one to 10 is, is is there thoughts that we're gonna,
like will we see tournaments that are gonna be in the future? Is that the thinking that the tournaments will be more like, like what, what's currently 3.5 let's say will be like, those players will be spread out between 3, 5 4 and four five and then those that are four L will be spread out? You know, I mean, I'm asking like, are there,
do we anticipate that there's gonna be more brackets, more numerical brackets, I guess level-wise? So, so, you know, the, the great thing about us is we're a technology company, right? And what we do is we create the tools and the enablement for organizers to decide how they want to cater to their players. So today there's an existing pathway and there's an existing way to do things.
And us Open had a couple incremental things that they were doing relative to what a PP and USAP is doing. But ultimately the governing body should be making decisions about, hey, how should we do the segmentation? Like right now you go to an event in New York and you plan, there's a limited set of players within each of these little divisions, right?
And is that the best way to do it? Or, and, and you run a one day event, or should it be something else? So, you know, that's above my pay grade ultimately to decide like, Hey, how do you wanna structure the sport going forward? What are some general guidelines and rules as you continue to perpetuate this? You know,
change is hard for people, right? And so once you sort of get set in a certain way, traditionalists, and this is how we do things, but you will have the ability now as the, the baseline of players grows, more and more people are more accurately measured and rated to be able to think about that as an organizer. Now that's separate from maybe some of these macro governing bodies pathway,
but at a club you, you know, you can take our software, you can go in and say, look, we want to create a different approach here and we're gonna give you the tool set to be able to do that. So it really becomes what does the organizer want to do and how do they want to cater to their clientele? And,
and that's ultimately what we've done. We built technology to support the organizers, the coaches, the federations, the governing bodies. And then we also have direct to consumer where you can go and download a mobile app, have your own ratings, see your results, you know, reach out to people, create your own groups, self-organize, so that you sort of have the best of both worlds on the same platform.
Awesome. Yeah, that sounds really, I mean listen, it's a, like you said earlier, right? It's a evolution. It's a e evolving, you know, the better we can get at ratings, I, I can't agree with you more, you know, the, the better, the stronger our sport will be. Because when we're playing competition,
we can play at, at, you know, more even levels and we can also have fun or competitive play, whether it's, you know, kwi ultimate style play or you know, a team leagues and things like that when there's, you know, better ratings. That'll definitely help with that. Mark, is there a, if a Pickleball player listening to this wants to see if they have a rating with you guys or find out more,
what's the best way to access that? Your portal or get, get in touch with you guys? Yeah, so, so just go to UTR sports and you can go in there and we have a whole section on Pickleball and I think now you can go in, you can set up a free account, you can take our provisional rating. If you haven't played in any of these a PP series of events,
you can have that rating of one to five. You can immediately start posting your own scores with your friends. If you want to start to develop a numerical one, you can create your own little groups. So you can create groups for free and say, Hey listen, I wanna set up my groups on Saturday and Sunday. You can organize, you can invite,
et cetera. So we really have created all those tools and what you're gonna start to see now is we're gonna start to really start to grow the number of events in a series of other things that you now can also look to register and sign up for. We're gonna be rolling out across the country to all the venues across America to offer them our technology and,
and really help support getting people up and running. So I think a lot more to come and, you know, I think we're super excited about supporting the sport. You know, it took us an extra year or two to get here just 'cause we were so preoccupied with everything in tennis. That's why you saw a couple of our folks jump over and start duper,
they actually came from our firm as you may or may not know, you know, and, and they basically, you know, saw the same vision that we had created and wanted to start to do that. I think that, you know, we got 150 people, we are super committed to building best in breed capabilities and you know, I think we're,
we're investing a lot of money to build that capability and we're super excited about it to, to support the sport. I love it, mark. And, and we'll put a, a description in the show notes about, or the website, we'll put it in the show notes for you. You'll be able to check it out there. We look forward to tracking your growth and,
you know, congratulations on the USA Pickleball relationship and the A PP. We're huge fans of Ken, Melissa, and everybody over at the a PP and everything they're doing. We think it's amazing. And so it's great to see good people getting together and helping grow the sport. Appreciate what you're doing, mark, and we'll stay in touch and if there's other initiatives that we can help spread with our listeners,
we're certainly happy to do that. Super well, thanks for everything you do and it's great to have folks like yourself that support the support here and address people's questions and needs. So look forward to hopefully seeing you in New York. Look forward to seeing you there, mark. Appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks Tony. All the best. Appreciate Mark jumping on the podcast to help us understand more about ratings and help us navigate that part of our sport.
In the show notes, there's a link to UTR sports. You can go there and check out your rating if you have one, if you played in the a PP tour. And if you have not, you can take their, their quiz they have and find out more about your rating and figure out what's next for your journey. If you enjoyed the podcast,
as always, consider rating and reviewing it and share with your friends. Remember, if you enjoy the podcast, they probably will too. I'll see you this Friday for a regular episode of Pickleball Therapy.