Why the ITA Adopted the WTN

Yesterday “Overthinking the ITA Adoption of the WTN” discussed the announcement that the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) has adopted WTN as the exclusive official rating for college tennis. ITA COO Dave Mullins observed “Change can be difficult” during his opening remarks on a webinar a short time later.

Today we are exploring the changes that Mullins was alluding to as well as the reasons that the ITA has elected to go with WTN. While the webinar revealed a lot of new information about the new rating system, today we are narrowly focusing on the aspects that likely drove the ITA’s decision.

But first, we need to touch briefly on the Universal Tennis Rating (UTR) elephant in the room. All participants in the ITA webinar fastidiously avoided naming it. In fact there was only one oblique reference to the alternative rating system as it was described as “the company I used to work for” by one of the presenters. I will defer my thoughts on the overt omission for now.

The adoption of the WTN as the exclusive official rating for college tennis was indeed a change. In 2017, the ITA entered into a 5-year agreement with the company now called Universal Tennis. As a part of that agreement, the ITA endorsed the UTR as “the official rating system of the ITA. At the time, the announcement referred to UTR as a vital standard to be used by college coaches and athletes to assess tennis skill levels for recruiting as well as match and tournament play.

As it turns out, I am one of those engineers who can do a little math. The five-year agreement between the ITA and Universal Tennis expired at the end of 2022. In other words, the ITA announcement of the transition to WTN in January came immediately after the UTR partnership agreement expired.

On the surface, the ITA is positioning the WTN as a tool to support recruiting and level-based match play. In other words, exactly the same things that UTR was used for. This is hardly a surprising observation, as that is exactly how coaches use rating systems. In general, rating systems support metric-based recruiting and provide coaches with a solid basis for evaluating talent.

My personal opinion is that the ITA would not have made the switch without a compelling reason to do so. Despite the ITF and USTA participation in the webinar, I do not think the change in direction is because the ITA was strong-armed into that decision.

Fundamentally, I believe that economics is a primary driver of the decision. However, to say that this is strictly a financial matter would be inaccurate. Key differences in the way UTR and WTN are monetized directly drive the respective architectures and business models of the two rating systems. Ultimately, those downstream differences are what precipitated the ITA selection of WTN going forward.

I will eventually do a detailed breakdown of how I think money ultimately drove the implementation of the two competing rating systems. For now, these are the reasons for moving to the WTN given by the ITA during the webinar.

WTN is free to use by players, coaches, and fans.
The Tennis Open Data Standard (TODS) results in higher data integrity for WTN.
- TODS identifies players and exchanges information using a Tennis ID that is unique to each player.
The ITA (and National Federations) have free and flexible access to data from WTN.
The WTN tools for supporting tournaments, camps, and clinics are free.
90% of the global tennis population has match data flowing to WTN.

Ultimately, these considerations are a direct result of the fact that the ITF is using WTN to promote tennis. While Universal Tennis will certainly also claim that objective, that organization has a need to generate revenue. The ITF is not encumbered by that constraint. The difference impacted the respective architectural decisions of both organizations. I will eventually break that down in a future post that… will be very long and hard to read.

For now, I will simply observe that the divergent architectures has given the WTN a decisive advantage in terms of data integrity. That turns out to be a non-negotiable part of any credible rating system. I think that is the ultimate reason behind the ITA’s decision.

From an ITA and coach’s perspective, inaccurate or fraudulent data within the UTR system was likely very concerning. Coaches forced to make recruiting and scholarship decisions based primarily on rating systems have a vested interest in ensuring that the data driving the algorithms are accurate and fair. UTR simply could not deliver that on a global scale.

When you examine the webinar and associated materials, it is clear that the ITA is being treated like an additional National Federation by the ITF. In fact, it was emphasized that the USTA had also elected to go with the WTN using language that reflected a peer-to-peer relationship.

Collegiate Tennis in the United States is an important part of the global tennis landscape. Consequently, the adoption of the WTN represents a seismic shift in the tennis ecosystem. I will elaborate on those themes when the “Unplugged” series of posts resumes next Friday.