Executive Summary

A parent we work with recently captured the state of competitive junior tennis in a single sentence.

Every single parent and child depends on the two decimal rating system. The kids describe each other first through giving their rating. Ah yeah, I know them, he or she is an X rating.

That sentence should give the entire tennis world pause. It captures, in plain language, the cultural shift that has overtaken the sport in the last decade. A measuring tool has become a mirror, and the mirror is starting to crack. This paper is a call to reset the focus before that crack widens.

Over the last decade, detailed two decimal rating systems have become the dominant measuring stick in junior tennis. They have delivered real benefits: more accurate seeding, fairer recognition of players whose families cannot afford to chase ranking points across the country, and a tool that college coaches can trust when they have never seen a recruit play in person. Those gains are real, and we acknowledge them at the outset.

The same systems, however, have produced consequences that no thoughtful coach, parent, or player can ignore any longer. Juniors are walking onto courts assuming they have already lost because a number is one hundredth of a point lower than their opponent’s. Players are abandoning matches mid set to protect a rating. Winners are leaving the court feeling they have lost because they gave up too many games. A culture has formed in which children meet at a tournament and introduce themselves by their rating before they introduce themselves as a person. The cost of this shift is being paid in self belief, in love of the game, in mental health, and in the very performance the rating was meant to measure.

This white paper is a call for a reset. We are not asking the global tennis community to abandon what works in the current systems. We are introducing an alternative, the Match Tennis Relative Strength Indicator, a one decimal level expression on a 1.0 to 10.0 scale, drawn from a player’s USTA ranking, World Tennis Number, ITF ranking, and additional performance variables. The RSI is built specifically for United States junior tournament players in the age divisions 12 through 18. It is designed to live alongside the existing systems while restoring the mindset that produced great tennis players long before the two decimal era began, a mindset of process over outcome, self appraisal over social comparison, and player level over rating chasing.

What follows is the case for that reset, drawn from forty years of combined coaching, parenting, playing, and tournament directing experience, and from nine years of observing the global junior ecosystem at scale through Match Tennis App.

About the Authors

Heath and Lindsay Waters have lived competitive tennis from every available angle.

Lindsay Waters competed on the WTA Tour for twenty years and reached a career high singles ranking of #33 in the world. She holds several wins over top ten ranked WTA players in her career.

Heath Waters spent twenty years coaching on the ATP and WTA Tours. The professional players he has guided have together won more than ninety professional titles. As a coach of juniors, he has developed three players to top ten ITF world rankings, and his students have accumulated more than thirty USTA national gold balls. He has also directed two USTA professional $25,000 events, in Atlanta, Georgia, and Jackson, Mississippi.

Heath and Lindsay are also tennis parents. Their daughter played the junior circuit for approximately three years and achieved a top 125 national ranking. Their son played from age eight through eighteen, achieved a top ten national ranking in the boys junior division, and is currently competing on a Division I tennis scholarship. As parents, their explicit aim through their son’s junior years was to keep the family focused on the process of growth rather than the outcomes of any particular match, and to remember in every city they traveled to that they were first a family and only second a tennis family. They made it a point in every tournament city to find one thing to do together that had nothing to do with tennis.

They own Match Tennis App, which today serves more than 90,000 subscribers and is the most used tennis tournament app for parents, players, and coaches in the United States. Through that user base, they have observed the cultural shift in junior tennis at a scale that very few others can claim.

The reason for this paper is straightforward. They have seen the sport from inside the player’s experience, the coach’s challenge, the parent’s car ride home, and the tournament director’s table. They believe the next generation of competitive players deserves a healthier environment in which to discover what they are capable of, and they believe the tennis community is ready to have this conversation.

The Challenge

Detailed two decimal rating systems entered junior tennis with the promise of measurement precision. They have largely delivered on that promise. What they did not promise, but what they have nonetheless produced, is a cultural shift that has changed how players, parents, and coaches behave at and around a tennis match.

The shift can be summarized in a single sentence. The rating has become the focal point of the competition before the competition begins.

Consider how this plays out in practice.

A junior walks onto the court against an opponent whose rating is one or two tenths of a point higher. Long before the warm up is complete, the lower rated player has already decided, often without realizing it, that the result is foregone. Body language softens. The first three games are played not to win but to confirm what the rating has already told them. When they lose, they are not surprised. When they win, they often believe they were lucky rather than that they outplayed a player at a similar level.

A junior wins a match against a lower rated opponent in three close sets. They walk off the court not with the satisfaction of a hard fought victory but with the irritation of someone who knows their rating may have dropped because the score was not decisive enough. They lost too many games, or a set, in the match. The fact that they prevailed on a difficult day has been overshadowed by a number that punishes them for the very resilience the sport should be teaching.

A parent walks down the sidewalk after their child has just lost a close third set match. They pass another parent and player. The question asked is not, did you have fun, or, did you fight hard, or, what did you learn or improve today. The question asked, again and again, across the global junior ecosystem, is, did you win. The question itself reveals what the culture has come to value.

One parent recently captured the situation with a single sentence:

Every single parent and child depends on the two decimal rating system. The kids describe each other first through giving their rating. Ah yeah, I know them, he or she is an X rating.

That sentence should give the entire tennis world pause. Our children are not their ratings. They are growing young human beings with hearts, with developing identities, with a love of a beautiful game. When the first thing a thirteen year old offers to a peer is a number that updates after every match, we have allowed a measuring tool to become a mirror, and the mirror is starting to crack.

The behaviors we have documented are not the worst case. They are the new normal.

Higher rated players play in mental handcuffs every single match.

Because every match carries the possibility of regression, even after a win, the freedom that produces great tennis is replaced by a constant background calculation: how many games can I afford to lose, will my rating drop if I lose this set. That calculation is the enemy of the relaxed intensity that produces top performance. A generation of talented players is playing to protect a number rather than to compete, and their actual development is being constrained by the very system meant to measure it.

Lower rated players play in a state of learned helplessness.

Repeated exposure to the message that the rating says you cannot win this produces, in adolescents especially, a quiet erosion of self efficacy, which is to say a quiet erosion of what one believes one can and cannot do. The lower rated player is not just losing matches. They are losing the belief that their actions can change outcomes. That belief is the precondition for growth in any performance domain. Once it is gone, no amount of coaching will replace it, because a player who does not believe they have a chance has stopped reaching for one.

Parents, who almost universally want what is best for their children, are nonetheless drawn into the same gravitational field.

Because the two decimal rating is the currency in which college coaches now transact, the family feels, often correctly, that their child’s future depends on protecting and increasing a number. The number takes its place at the family dinner table, in the car on the way to the tournament, and in the post match conversation. Many parents we have spoken with sense that something is wrong, but cannot see a way out, because the system has become the system.

College coaches reach for the most efficient sorting tool available.

Presented with thousands of recruits across the globe, college coaches naturally use the two decimal rating to triage. It is not their fault that the tool has, in practice, sometimes reduced complex young people to a single comparable number. The unintended consequence, however, has been a recruiting environment in which the rating sometimes decides the player’s college future before the coach has met the player. We have also observed a related effect on American junior tennis, in that the precision of these systems makes it easier for college coaches to recruit international players sight unseen, which has shifted the composition of many top college rosters. We support international players in American college tennis, and we also believe a healthier American junior development environment will produce stronger American players for those programs.

The Structural Suppression of Grit, Resilience, and Persistence

There is a particular harm here that deserves its own treatment, because it cuts to the heart of what player development is supposed to produce.

The two decimal rating systems, by the simple structure of how they are calculated, work against the development of grit, resilience, and persistence in young players. This is not intentional. No one designed these systems to undermine character development. But it is a structural consequence of how they operate, and the consequence is real.

Consider what happens when a player can win a match and still see their rating regress. The signal the system sends, regardless of intent, is that the act of finding a way to win on a difficult day, the very act we want to praise and reinforce in our young people, can be punished. A player who grinds out a close three set win against a lower rated opponent on an off day has done something that great champions in every sport are celebrated for. The system, however, may respond by lowering the number that the player and their family have been taught to watch.

The behavioral response is predictable. Players become more concerned with protecting the rating than with developing the character. They abandon matches before finishing a set because they fear dropping too many games. They protect by retreat rather than prevail through resistance. The very situations that would, in any healthy environment, build a young person’s belief that they can find a way through adversity, are converted into situations to avoid.

This is the opposite of optimal player development.

In real player development, we want a young player to celebrate finding a way to win when they did not have their best day on court. We want them to develop the resilience, the grit, and the persistence that define the greatest champions in every sport. We want them to walk off the court after a close win against a lower rated opponent and feel proud, not punished because their rating is about to drop two or three tenths. Finding a way to succeed when conditions are difficult is a characteristic of a champion on the tennis court, and it is a life skill we want every young person to carry into every challenge they will face beyond tennis.

The current environment, structurally, works against this very principle. It is not a flaw in the player. It is not a flaw in the parent. It is not a flaw in the coach. It is a structural feature of a measurement tool that was never designed to reward the act of finding a way. And until that structural mismatch is addressed, the very characteristics we most want to build in our young people will continue to be quietly suppressed by the number they have been taught to protect.

The Inverse Effect: When Not Playing Raises the Rating

The structural critique cuts in both directions. The same system that can punish a hard fought win can also reward a long absence from competition. We share one story, true and recent, that illustrates the point.

A Division I women’s college tennis player had a strong fall season and finished it with a two decimal rating of 7.95. In November of 2025 she sustained an ankle injury that required surgery. She missed the entire spring dual match season. She did not play a single competitive match for seven months. During that same period she entered the transfer portal, hoping to change schools. By June of 2026, having played no matches at all, her two decimal rating had moved from 7.95 to 8.5. Without striking a single ball in competition, her rating had advanced by more than seven tenths of a point, a movement that, in the very system college coaches use for recruiting, materially changed how she was evaluated.

The outcome reinforced the point. On the strength of that elevated rating, she received a full athletic scholarship offer from a different Division I program, a more substantial package than the one she had held at her previous school. The recruiting decision, made by an experienced college coaching staff doing exactly what the system invites them to do, was made on the basis of a rating that had risen during seven consecutive months in which the player did not compete.

We bear no ill will toward this player. She did not design the system. She did not game it. She was injured, she recovered, and the rating she carried into the portal happened to be meaningfully higher than the rating she carried into the injury. We share the story because the math itself reveals a structural feature of the system that the tennis community should be willing to look at honestly.

The mechanism is straightforward. Rating systems use a moving window of recent results. As older matches age out of the window, their influence on the rating diminishes or disappears. If a player has lost matches that, over time, fall off the back of the window, the rating can rise without any new evidence of improvement. For an injured player, this is a quirk. For a healthy player, it is a temptation.

We have begun to see exactly that temptation in practice. Some players, on observing that a couple of close losses near the edge of the window are dragging their rating down, choose to play fewer matches in hopes that those losses will age off and the rating will rise. Others, who have recently scored two strong wins against higher rated opponents, choose to play fewer matches in hopes of preserving the boost those wins provided. In each case, the structure of the system, not the character of the player, is making the choice to not play the rational one.

This is the opposite of what a player development environment should encourage. Players grow through repetition in the target environment. There is no substitute for the experience of competing match after match against opponents who push them. A junior or college player who plays less because the rating math rewards absence is a player who is choosing, rationally inside a flawed system, against their own development. The system has installed, as a side effect of its design, a disincentive to do the very thing the sport requires of them.

This challenge is not theoretical. It is happening now. And it joins the structural suppression of grit, resilience, and persistence as the second structural critique that any honest examination of the current environment has to confront. A measurement system that rewards not playing, alongside a measurement system that punishes hard fought wins, has lost touch with what player development is actually for.

The Match Tennis Relative Strength Indicator is structured to mute both of these effects. Its slower movement and its reliance on multiple variables, not just a moving window of match results, mean that long absences do not produce dramatic rating gains, and short hot streaks do not produce dramatic rating spikes. In the RSI environment, the rational choice for a player who wants to improve is to play more, not less. That is how it should be.

This is the world the two decimal era has created. We are not the first to notice it. Coaches, parents, and players have been quietly raising these concerns for years. What has been missing is an alternative.

What the Current Systems Got Right

A serious proposal for change has to begin by acknowledging what is working.

The two decimal rating systems have produced the most accurate measurement of tennis playing level ever available to the global tennis community. That is not a small achievement. Before they existed, college coaches recruiting internationally had to rely on rankings that varied enormously in their meaning from country to country, and on the recommendations of intermediaries whose interests did not always align with the player’s. Today, a coach in the United States can evaluate a player in Bulgaria, in Brazil, or in Bangkok with a degree of confidence that was simply not possible fifteen years ago. That is a significant gain.

The systems have also helped players whose families cannot afford to chase ranking points across the country. A junior in a rural area who plays mostly local events but plays at a high level can now be identified and recruited on the strength of their measured performance rather than the geography of their schedule. That is a fairer outcome than what came before.

For tournament directors, the precision of these systems has produced more accurate seedings and, in many draws, more competitive matches. We have used them ourselves in this capacity and have benefited from the accuracy they provide.

For some players, the rating itself does function as a motivator. There are juniors for whom the visible progress of a moving number provides the daily push toward improvement, and we will not pretend otherwise.

The strongest version of the case against this paper, however, is not about seeding sheets or recruiting reach. It is this. The cultural challenges we have described are not caused by the rating system at all. They are caused by parenting, by social media, by the broader achievement culture in which today’s juniors are growing up. On this view, the rating is the thermometer, not the disease. Take the thermometer away and the fever continues.

We have considered that argument carefully, and we believe it is partially right and substantively wrong. It is partially right in that the underlying cultural forces of comparison, anxiety, and performance pressure are not the rating’s invention. They predate it and would continue without it. It is substantively wrong, however, in treating the rating as a passive instrument. The rating is not passive. It is an actor in the system. It updates after every match. It travels with the player into every conversation. It is checked nightly by parents and players alike. A thermometer that displayed its reading in every room of the house, that beeped after every meal, that the family consulted before every social interaction, would not be a passive instrument either. It would be doing something to the patient.

The broader cultural pressures may be real, but the rating amplifies, accelerates, and embeds them. Removing or muting the rating does not solve the underlying challenge. It does, however, reduce the daily volume at which the challenge is broadcast into a child’s life. That is the contribution the Match Tennis Relative Strength Indicator is designed to make.

The case for the reset is not that the current rating systems are without value. The case for the reset is that the cultural and psychological cost of the current environment has come to outweigh the measurement benefits, and that a complementary tool can preserve what those systems do well while restoring what the sport has lost. The alternative we propose lives alongside what already exists. It is not a replacement. It is a reset, expressed in the form of an additional measurement that nudges the culture back toward mental health.

The Psychology That Underwrites Everything

The case for the Match Tennis Relative Strength Indicator rests on three interlocking psychological principles. Each principle is well established in sport psychology research and is corroborated by our own experience at every level of the game, from the ATP and WTA tours to junior development. We discuss each in turn.

Principle One. Process Focus Versus Outcome Focus

A process focused tennis player directs their attention to what they can control. Effort. Attitude. Footwork to the next ball. The quality of the serve they are about to hit. The strategic adjustment they want to make on the next return. The competitive spirit they are bringing to the next point. Honest self appraisal at the end of the match, in the service of the next practice.

An outcome focused player directs their attention to what they cannot control. The result. The score. The rating. What the parent in the chair is thinking. What the college coach watching from the corner will write down. Whether the opponent’s rating will move up or down based on this match.

The research is clear and the experience of every coach who has worked at the highest level confirms it. Focusing on the process produces better outcomes than focusing on the outcomes. Focusing on the outcomes interferes with the very actions that produce them.

When a player’s attention is occupied by a rating that updates after every match, the architecture of attention is interrupted. Even the most disciplined fourteen year old cannot fully concentrate on the next point when, somewhere in the back of their mind, a calculation is running: if I lose this point and this game, my rating drops, and if my rating drops by enough, my recruiting changes, and if my recruiting changes, my future changes. That calculation is incompatible with the relaxed intensity that produces a player’s best tennis.

We have watched the consequences of this divided attention thousands of times. We have also watched, in the cases where a player succeeds in shifting back to process focus, the transformation that follows.

One of Heath’s junior students, a player who had reached a top ten national ranking, found himself trapped in an extended period of outcome obsession. He had begun retiring matches he did not want on his record. His rating had begun to slip, and his confidence with it. The endless mental loop in matches, the constant if I lose this set my rating goes down, how am I losing to this player, had begun to define his on court experience.

He got tired of it. Without a coach intervention as the catalyst, he chose, on his own, to return to the process. He decided to focus only on what he could control point by point until the opponent shook his hand. The change in his results was significant. The change in his statistics was significant. The change that mattered most, however, was that his joy for the game returned. He stopped associating his rating with his identity. He began playing for the love of competing again.

That story is the story of every player who breaks free from the trap. The path is always the same. It starts with the recognition that the rating is not who you are. It is only where the rating system says you are at this moment.

Principle Two. Self Appraisal Versus Social Comparison

The post match conversation is one of the most consequential moments in a junior’s development. It is the moment at which the player interprets what just happened. It is also the moment at which the parent, often without meaning to, teaches the player what to value.

There are wrong questions. Did you win. Why did you give that set away. How did you lose to that player. How many games did you lose. Each of these questions, whatever the parent’s intention, points the player outward toward comparison and outward toward outcome. Each is, at heart, a question about a number.

There are right questions. Did you have fun. What did you improve today. Did you fight with all you had. What did you learn. If you played that match again, would you do anything differently. Each of these questions points the player inward toward honest self appraisal. Each treats the match as an opportunity for growth rather than an entry in a permanent record.

Healthy self appraisal is the operating system of every champion we have ever coached or played against. It does not deny that the player lost. It does not pretend the score was something it was not. It simply asks the player to evaluate themselves against their own standard, against what they know they are capable of, and to use that evaluation as fuel for the next session.

Social comparison is the operating system that detailed rating systems install. When the rating updates after every match, the player’s evaluation of themselves is no longer their own. It is delivered by the system. It is benchmarked against every other player with a rating. The adolescent brain, which is already prone to social comparison in every other domain of life, now has a numerical version of it built directly into their sport.

The psychological cost of constant social comparison in adolescents is well documented. It correlates with reduced self confidence, increased self doubt, weakened self efficacy, and diminished grit and persistence. None of these are outcomes the tennis community wants for its young players. All of these are outcomes the current environment is increasingly producing.

Principle Three. Player Level Versus Chasing Ratings

There is a meaningful difference between a player who understands, I am at a competitive level right now, with these strengths and these areas to grow, and a player who is, chasing a 12.5 rating.

The level expression preserves dignity. It says, in effect, that the player has reached a place that took real work to reach, that they share that place with many others, and that any given match against another player at or near that level is genuinely contested. It is a snapshot of where they stand. It is not an identity.

The rating chase wears down both dignity and competitive joy. Every match becomes an evaluation. Every set becomes a defense. Every game lost is a small subtraction from who the player is allowed to think they are. The I must be perfect syndrome that follows is incompatible with the kind of free, expressive tennis that produces real growth and produces, ultimately, the outcomes the player and their family want.

Ten years of rating chasing, accumulated across a junior career, produces a recognizable type of eighteen year old. We have seen many of them. They are technically proficient. They have data on every aspect of their game. They are also, very often, tired. Their self efficacy has been gradually depleted by a decade of measurement that punished resilience as often as it rewarded it. Their love for the sport, which once led them to the court at age eight, has narrowed into something more careful, more anxious, and less alive.

We can do better than this for the next generation.

What True Player Development Requires

The case for the Match Tennis Relative Strength Indicator is, at its core, a case about player development. We close the conceptual argument of this paper with a story that shows what true player development requires, and what the current environment, structurally, does not allow.

A coach worth their salt develops a player’s game so that the player can one day realize their full potential. To play at the highest level of the sport, a player needs a complete repertoire. Each surface, clay, grass, hard court, indoor, asks a different set of questions of the player, and a player without the full set of answers will be limited. The slice backhand, the heavy topspin, the sharp angle, the transition game, the variety at the net, none of these are optional for a player who wants the top of the game. They are required.

Building that repertoire is not the same as protecting a number.

The Slice Backhand Tournament

A few years ago, Lindsay and I were developing a group of nine, ten, and eleven year olds at our academy. Several were already nationally ranked in the under twelve division. That month, the developmental focus was the slice backhand. We made a coaching decision that the players would only use the slice backhand at an upcoming local tournament. The two handed topspin backhand, which several of them already hit beautifully, would be off the table. We wanted the players in the target environment, under pressure, finding ways to win with a shot they were just learning, because what a player does in practice and what a player does in a match can be very different.

We explained the plan to the players and to the parents before the event. We told them the restriction was for the sake of the player’s long term development. We told them we wanted the slice backhand challenged in competition so that the players would learn how to use it, how to be creative with it, how to be consistent with it, and how to find a way to win even when the most familiar shot in their game was unavailable. Everyone agreed.

When the matches began, some of the players struggled, and our highest ranked player at the time lost a third set tiebreaker to a lower rated opponent. The parents became upset. They did not understand why we had not allowed the players to use their two handed backhands so they could win. We told them the players could still have won, the slice was simply not yet mastered, and the rating gap between the two girls was small enough that the match was close on the merits. The previous meeting between the same two players, without any restriction, had also been close, a 6-4, 6-4 result.

We held the line on the process. Sometimes a player has to go backwards while a skill is being acquired, before they can leap forward.

Two weeks later, in a major tournament, our highest rated player drew the same opponent in the second round. This time there was no restriction. Our player had her two handed backhand, her slice backhand, and the rest of her game available to her. The match was a dominant performance. She used the slice at the right moments to change rhythm, to change the height of the ball, and to draw weak responses out of her opponent. The shot she had been forced to learn at the previous tournament was now a tool she could deploy on her own terms. She won 6-0, 6-0.

Her two decimal rating had dropped after the first match. It went back up substantially over the next sixty days, because her actual level had grown. She began defeating higher rated players she had not previously been able to defeat. The investment in mastery, paid in the form of one third set tiebreaker loss to a slightly lower rated player, had returned itself many times over.

This is what we mean when we say that ratings can punish the very things that produce great players.

The 1 to 100 Model of Mastery

We have found it helpful to share, with both players and parents, a simple mental model of how mastery actually works.

Imagine a player’s full potential is 100. In reality there is no 100, because even the number one player in the world is still trying to improve something. But as an illustration, suppose a nine or ten year old is currently at a 5 on the path toward 100.

When the player begins to acquire a new skill, a new grip on the serve, a slice backhand, a heavier topspin, a sharper angle, an attacking transition game, they will, while they are learning it, often drop. The 5 may temporarily look like a 3 or a 4, because the new skill is not yet integrated and the old comfort patterns are being interrupted on purpose. Then, once mastery sets in, the player does not return to 5. They go past 5. They become a 6 or a 7. The dip was the cost of the lift.

This pattern repeats across the entire career of any player who is serious about reaching their potential. The players who refuse the dip, who refuse to look worse temporarily in service of becoming better permanently, cap themselves. They impose, often without realizing it, a ceiling on their own development. The players who accept the dip, again and again, are the players whose ceilings keep moving.

Sometimes you have to get worse before you get better. Once mastery sets in, the worse becomes much better than the previous best.

This is the principle that the two decimal rating environment makes difficult to practice. A measurement that updates after every match, that punishes the temporary dip and rewards the comfortable plateau, makes the developmental dip feel like a defeat. Parents who do not know the model see only the rating drop. Players who are watching the number see only the regression. The 6 or 7 that is coming is invisible to a system that only measures yesterday’s 3.

The Match Tennis Relative Strength Indicator is structured to give players, parents, and coaches the room to make the developmental dip without feeling that the player has been demoted as a person. The RSI moves slowly, draws on more inputs, and expresses comparisons rather than verdicts. Inside that environment, a player who takes on a new skill may see a few of the gaps in their comparisons widen temporarily as the skill is being acquired, and then watch those gaps close and reverse as mastery sets in. The math does not punish them along the way for the act of becoming.

This is the kind of environment that produces players who reach their potential. It is also, not coincidentally, the kind of environment that produces players who love the game enough to keep playing it.

Wisdom From the Top: What the Pro Tour Remembers

It is worth pausing on a simple observation that the global tennis community would do well to absorb. At the very highest level of the men’s and women’s professional tours, no one knows or cares about their two decimal rating. Players in the top fifty do not ask each other what their rating is. They do not discuss it in interviews. They do not consult it before walking on court. It is not part of the conversation that the best tennis players in the world have about their own sport.

What they do discuss is competing. Bringing their best tennis on a given day. Finding a way to win when they are not at their best. Respecting an opponent who has outplayed them in the biggest moments. Returning to the next match.

Days before this paper was drafted, Jannik Sinner and Aryna Sabalenka, the top seeds at Roland Garros, lost early in the tournament. Sinner was hampered by cramping. Sabalenka did not bring her best mental performance. Neither of them, in their post match comments, said anything about a rating. They spoke about competing.

A few days earlier, a nineteen year old Brazilian named João Fonseca played Novak Djokovic, the all time leader in Grand Slam singles titles, in a match that lasted five sets. Djokovic won the first two sets. Fonseca won the next three. Djokovic’s reaction afterwards was not bitterness. It was respect. He said, simply, that in the big moments Fonseca had merely outplayed him.

The sentence is worth holding in mind. Two players at a similar level. Two days of preparation behind them. A handful of decisive points one way or the other. The player who executed in the biggest moments prevailed. The number next to either of their names had nothing to do with the outcome.

That match will be remembered, by the tennis world, only by who won and who lost. The score will fade. The games will fade. The years between Djokovic’s age and Fonseca’s age will fade. What will remain is that a young Brazilian found a way to beat the legend on a five set day, and that the legend congratulated him for it.

This is how the sport remembers itself at the top. The two decimal rating culture that has shaped junior tennis has no equivalent in the pro tour, because at the pro tour level no one believes that a number can predict, much less determine, the outcome of a match between two players of similar level on a given day.

Heath has coached this principle into players at the highest level. In one Australian Open, his player Alex Bogomolov Jr. had qualified through three matches and drew the fifth seed, Fernando Gonzalez, in the first round of the main draw. Gonzalez was known to have one of the largest forehands on tour. He would be the Australian Open finalist the following year, against the legend Roger Federer. Bogomolov Jr. was, on paper, a heavy underdog.

The work they had done leading into that match was about exactly the shift this paper is asking the junior tennis community to make. They had taken statistics on every match Bogomolov had played. They had directed his attention to self appraisal against his own performance benchmarks. They had moved his focus from the fifth seed in the world to the process of competing point by point against the standards he knew produced his own best tennis, the standards that, statistically, would defeat the number five player in the world if he reached them again.

Bogomolov walked onto the court in the right head space. He went up two sets to none. Then, as the match crossed into the night and the crowd grew louder, the outcome thoughts began to creep in. He found himself thinking, I am on ESPN and I am two sets and a break up on the fifth seed at the first Grand Slam of the year. His level dropped. Gonzalez won the next two sets.

At the start of the fifth set, Bogomolov had a choice. He chose process. He yelled to his coaching box, Coach, I don’t care, do you care. He let go. He removed the mental handcuffs, the distracting thoughts that had impeded his performance. He won the fifth. He upset the fifth seed at the Australian Open. The match became a turning point in his career. He learned that he did indeed have the mental discipline to direct his attention toward the processes that led him to his best tennis, and that in turn meant defeating a top five ranked player in the world.

Lindsay’s Twenty Years on Tour

Lindsay competed at the highest level of women’s tennis for two decades and reached number 33 in the world. The mindset difference she observed between the players who reached the very top and those who plateaued is, in her view, the same difference at issue in this paper.

The players who reached the top were not the players who avoided adversity. They were the players who saw adversity as a challenge and rose to it. Serena Williams, against whom Lindsay played, would sometimes hit eighty unforced errors in a match. But when the points mattered, she found a way to execute. Lindsay broke Serena twice in their US Open match. Serena did not waver. She held her own serve, broke back at the right moment, served big on the points that decided the match, and won 6-4, 6-3. The match came down to a handful of points. The mental difference at the very top is not the absence of bad days. It is the presence of belief on bad days.

That belief, in Lindsay’s experience, is the same belief the junior environment is now slowly extracting from young players. Today’s twelve year olds are being trained to associate themselves with their rating, to read the rating before every match, and to play to protect it rather than to express themselves. None of the players Lindsay competed against at the top of the game thought that way. None of them would have survived the tour if they had.

If a top fifty player walked into a junior tournament today and listened to the parents and players talk, what would surprise them most is not the level of the tennis. It is that the conversation is more often about a number, a rating, than about competing.

What would we tell a fourteen year old who has already decided, before stepping on court, that they cannot beat the higher rated opponent across the net?

We would tell them this. The person across the net is a human being. They are imperfect, just like you. They have nerves, just like you. They will miss balls today they would not miss tomorrow, just like you. The number next to their name does not play tennis. The number does not hold the racquet. Their racquet is held by a person who, like every person, has good days and difficult days, who can be unsettled by a confident opponent, and who, against the right kind of fight, can be beaten on any given day. You always have a chance. Always.

That is the inheritance the pro tour can offer the junior game. It is the inheritance the Match Tennis Relative Strength Indicator is built to protect.

The Solution: The Match Tennis Relative Strength Indicator

The Match Tennis Relative Strength Indicator (RSI) is a comparative tool, available to Match Tennis App premium subscribers. The user-facing display does not assign a player a fixed rating that follows them around like a label. It does something different. Inside the Match Tennis App, a user opens a competitor list, an applicant list, or a player profile and selects an anchor player, the player whose comparisons they want to see. The RSI then displays, beside every other player in that view, a single plus or minus value showing how that player compares to the anchor. A 0.8 above. A 0.3 below. A 1.4 above. The display expresses one thing only, the gap, in either direction, between the selected player and every other player in the field.

It may help to understand what is happening underneath. The RSI is calculated internally on a 1.0 to 10.0 scale. The user, however, never sees that underlying number on the screen. The user sees only the delta, the difference between the selected anchor player and every other player in the field, presented as a single plus or minus value beside each name. In the Match Tennis App, that column is labeled RSI Δ. The underlying scale does its work in the background. The number on the screen is always a comparison, never a label.

It is generated by an algorithm that draws on a player’s USTA ranking, World Tennis Number, ITF ranking where available, and additional performance variables. It is launching first for United States junior tournament players in the age divisions 12 through 18, on applicant lists, competitor lists, and player profiles, with potential extension to ranking pages over time.

The RSI is designed to do three things at once.

First, it is designed to be a comparison rather than a label. The RSI cannot be carried by a player into a match against any opponent until that opponent is named. Open a different player’s profile and the numbers around the field shift, because the anchor has changed. There is no single RSI number that a thirteen year old can introduce themselves with at a tournament. By design, there is nothing to introduce.

Second, it is designed to move slowly. Because the RSI is drawn from multiple variables, not from match by match score data alone, the comparisons do not jump up or down after every match. A single bad day at a tournament will not redefine the gaps in a player’s profile. A single great win will not artificially inflate them. The RSI behaves the way a player’s level actually behaves in real life. It changes gradually, in response to a body of work, rather than dramatically, in response to a single Saturday afternoon.

Third, and most importantly, it is designed to remind everyone reading the display that a small gap is, on any given day, an even match. A plus 0.3 is a close match. A minus 0.4 is a close match. A plus 1.2 is a match the underdog can still win when they bring their best tennis. The display is not a tier or a rank. It is a number that the player should read and think, that is the player I am up against today, and I always have a chance.

The word relative in Relative Strength Indicator is intentional. It signals that the number is, by definition, a comparison. It exists in the space between two players. The honor of being in a strong position relative to the field is real. The identity is not borrowed from the comparison, because the comparison itself changes the moment the anchor changes.

We want to be explicit about what the RSI deliberately does not do. It does not produce a fixed rating fine grained enough to make every match a referendum on the player’s identity. It does not penalize the higher level player for grinding out a difficult three set win against a lower level opponent on an off day. It does not, in other words, build the very mental handcuffs we have spent the last decade observing in our juniors. The RSI is structured to soften the daily volume of comparison, not to amplify it.

A Day in the New Environment

Consider how an eleven year old’s tennis life looks one year after broad adoption of the RSI. She prepares by thinking about her game, not a number she will defend. When she looks at a draw inside the Match Tennis App, she sees, beside each potential opponent, a plus or minus value showing how that opponent compares to her. A plus 0.4 is a close match. A minus 0.3 is a close match. A plus 1.2 is a match she will need to play her best to win, and a match she can win on the right day. Whether she wins or loses a close three set match, the post match conversation with her parent turns toward what she learned and how she fought, not toward the scoreline. The numbers around her shift only gradually, on a body of work, not a single Saturday afternoon. Her coach debriefs the matches on the merits, not on the column of numbers. The number stops being the protagonist of her tennis life.

From the College Coach’s Perspective

From a college coach’s perspective, the RSI offers a clean, intuitive sorting lens. A coach can anchor on a player they know well, often a current player who fills a particular lineup position, and see at a glance how every prospect in a recruiting class compares. A plus 0.2 prospect is a close peer of that lineup spot. A plus 0.6 prospect is meaningfully above it. A minus 0.5 prospect is below it. The coach gets a quick read on fit without translating between different systems, while leaving the deeper evaluation, the character, the competitiveness, the coachability, the fit, where it belongs, with the coach’s own judgment.

There is more to a person than a rating. We believe character, integrity, sportsmanship, resilience, and grit matter more than any rating ever will. The RSI is meant to start that conversation, not to end it.

The comparisons that the RSI displays will move up and down with results, because no honest measure of level can avoid that. But the pace and granularity of movement have been chosen precisely so that a single match cannot rewrite a player’s sense of who they are. A junior playing in their first year in a new age division who loses two matches at a tournament does not see the gaps in their comparisons substantially altered by that weekend. Just as Sinner and Sabalenka can lose early at Roland Garros without losing their place at the top of their sport, a junior can have a difficult tournament without losing their place in the comparisons that matter most to them.

As the RSI moves from beta into broader use, Match Tennis App will monitor for any patterns of attempted gaming. The structure of the RSI, drawn from multiple variables and updated gradually rather than match by match, makes the most common gaming behaviors associated with the two decimal era largely uneconomical. We will adjust as needed.

Why a Higher Rated Player Should Welcome Close Matches Again

Before the two decimal era, a close three set victory, won on a difficult day against a lower rated opponent, was celebrated by coaches and parents alike. It was understood, by everyone watching, that the higher level player had been pushed, had been forced to find another gear, and had earned something more valuable than an easy win. They had earned the experience of finding a way.

In the current environment, the same victory can feel, to the higher rated player, like a defeat. The rating may drop. The conversation afterwards is colored by what was lost rather than what was won. The character that the difficult win was building is overshadowed by the number that the difficult win cost.

This is an alteration of what competitive sport is meant to teach. The RSI was designed, in part, to restore the original meaning of a hard fought win. A player who wins a difficult match, regardless of who their opponent was on paper, has done something that matters. The RSI will reflect that. The culture, in time, will follow.

Anticipated Objections and Honest Responses

A serious proposal benefits from naming, in advance, the strongest objections it will encounter, and answering them honestly. We do so here.

The alternative two decimal systems are more accurate than the RSI.

We agree, and the comparison is not even quite apples to apples. The two decimal systems express a fixed rating per player. The RSI expresses a gap between two players. The two decimal systems are mathematically more precise as fixed labels. The RSI is a relative strength indicator, deliberately designed to be sufficient for its purposes rather than maximally precise. The argument we are making is not about measurement. It is about culture. A measurement that is sufficient and culturally healthy may serve the next generation better than a measurement that is precise and culturally corrosive.

College coaches need a single number to recruit efficiently.

The RSI is also a single number for any comparison the coach wants to run. It does not deprive coaches of a sorting tool. It offers them an additional one, with the explicit understanding that the deeper evaluation, the character, integrity, sportsmanship, resilience, and grit that distinguish young athletes who will thrive in a college program, must still come from the coach’s own assessment. We believe the language of comparison rather than fixed rating makes that easier for everyone in the recruiting process to remember.

My child is motivated by the rating, it is working for them.

We respect that, sincerely. No single tool will work for every player and family, and parents who know their child best are entitled to use what works in their own household. The Match Tennis RSI is offered as an alternative, not as a replacement. For a child who is genuinely motivated by the visible progress of a rating, the existing systems will continue to provide that. The RSI will live alongside them, available to families who want a complementary measure that emphasizes level over chasing and identity over score keeping.

In practice, we believe many families will find that using both, with the RSI shaping the language of comparison and the more granular two decimal rating doing its narrower work in the background, gives them a healthier balance than either alone. A parent does not have to choose. They can use the RSI in the questions they ask after a match, in how they describe their child to a coach, and let the two decimal rating do its narrower work elsewhere. The reset we are proposing is not about which tool you use, it is about which tool your child believes is them.

Detailed ratings make my tournament draws fairer.

For tournament directors who find the existing systems valuable for seeding, those systems remain available. We are not asking tournament directors to stop using a tool that is producing better draws for their players. We are asking the broader community to recognize that the same tool, when it leaves the seeding sheet and enters the player’s identity, has produced unintended consequences. The RSI does not interfere with anyone’s draw. It offers an alternative way for players, parents, and coaches to think about level outside the draw.

What is the honest limitation of the RSI?

The RSI is not designed to be the most accurate measurement of playing level in the world. It is a comparative strength indicator, sufficient for its purpose, deliberately bounded in granularity, and deliberately slower to move than the two decimal systems. Families who want the maximum granularity of measurement will find the existing systems more precise. We accept that limitation as a feature of what we are trying to do, not a flaw to be corrected.

Implementation: What Match Tennis App Will Do

The Match Tennis Relative Strength Indicator will be displayed throughout the Match Tennis App platform wherever applicant lists, competitor lists, rankings, or player profiles appear. The rollout begins as an internal mechanism for the Match Tennis App subscriber community, which today numbers more than 90,000 parents, players, and coaches.

The aim of the first twelve months is straightforward. We want our community to live with the RSI alongside the existing systems and to begin to feel, in their own families and in their own coaching, what changes when a less granular, more relative measure becomes available.

If adoption takes hold within our community, the cultural shift will follow. Players will stop introducing themselves through a fixed rating, because no fixed rating will be on the screen to introduce. Parents will begin to ask different questions in the car on the way home from a tournament. Coaches will have an easier time directing their players’ attention away from a number that updates after every match and toward the process of growth that produces real tennis players.

We are not, at this stage, in formal dialogue with federations or sectional bodies about wider adoption. The RSI begins as a Match Tennis App tool for the families and coaches who already trust us. Whether and how it extends beyond that will depend on whether the broader tennis community sees in it what we see.

Success in the first year will not be measured in a chart. It will be measured in stories. A higher level player who walks off the court proud of a difficult three set win rather than worried about the score. A lower level player who walks on court against an opponent whose RSI shows a meaningful gap, and walks on still believing they have a chance. A parent who finds themselves asking, what did you learn, instead of, did you win. A coach who reports that their player is hitting more freely, more honestly, with more of their own game. When we hear those stories at scale, we will know the reset is taking hold.

What You Can Do Monday Morning

We have spent the last several thousand words on systems, psychology, and infrastructure. The truth, however, is that the most important changes happen in households, on practice courts, and in tournament environments. We close the practical section of this paper with concrete, immediate actions.

For parents.

Avoid discussing the two decimal rating with your child. Avoid watching it update. Avoid bringing it into the car. In its place, place your attention on the process that produces real tennis players: effort, attitude, fight, resilience, growth, and improvement. Ask the right questions after a match. Did you have fun. Did you try your hardest. What did you improve. What did you learn. What would you do differently if you played that match again. The questions you ask are the values you transmit. Choose them carefully.

For coaches.

Help your players take the mental handcuffs off. Redirect their attention to self appraisal and personal game growth. Direct their attention toward the personal statistics and metrics that can actually be measured, and guide them toward improving those. The real question should be, am I better today than I was yesterday, and that has to be measured, through match statistics, through video study, and through honest comparison to their last performance. Refuse to make the rating the topic of the lesson. Build a practice environment in which players are praised for resilience on a difficult day, not for the scoreline they achieved on an easy one. Players who never play freely never realize their full potential. Reshape the environment to reshape the behavior.

For tournament directors and sectional administrators.

The most consequential changes will happen between parents, players, and coaches, where the day to day language of the sport is shaped. Where you can, use the language of level rather than the language of rating in your communications and announcements. Where you can, create awards and recognition that celebrate competitive spirit, fight, and improvement, alongside the winners of the draw. Small cultural signals matter at scale.

The Vision: Junior Tennis in 2036

If the reset takes hold over the next decade, here is what we hope a Saturday tournament will feel like in 2036.

The players will be playing freely. The mental handcuffs will be gone. They will know that they do not have to be perfect, that one set lost is not a verdict on who they are, that a difficult three set win is a victory worth celebrating even when it comes against a lower rated or ranked player, and that a five set thriller against a higher level player is a story worth telling whether they won or lost.

A thirteen year old walking onto the court against a higher level opponent will feel something we will quote, in spirit, from the late great University of Alabama football coach, Bear Bryant. Maybe the higher rated opponent does not bring their best today. Maybe I bring just a little more. Maybe I have a chance. That belief, that one always has a chance against another human being on the other side of the net, is the inheritance the sport once gave its young people, and the inheritance we want them to receive again.

That same thirteen year old, walking off the court after a loss, will be allowed to feel something simple. This was not my best day. There is always tomorrow. It is one match. I can do better next time. That simple, healthy mental conclusion is being slowly taken from junior tennis. We want it back.

In the car on the way home, the parent will turn from the driver’s seat and ask: Did you have fun. What did you learn. Did you give it your full effort. Did you improve. The conversation will be about the child, not the number.

The stakes here are not just tennis stakes. The stakes are mental health, self belief, and self efficacy in our young people. We are facing, in the current environment, a widespread pattern of well meaning parents being drawn into a cultural system that has slowly and almost invisibly placed the rating in front of the child rather than behind them. We love our children far more than we love any rating. That is true of every parent we have ever met. The work of the next decade is to build an environment in which that love can be expressed without the daily distortion of a number that punishes the very resilience our children need to develop.

This is our invitation to the global tennis community. Help us reset the focus. Help us shift the paradigm. Help us return junior tennis to the love of competition and the discipline of growth that produced great players long before the two decimal era, and that will produce great players long after.

One Sentence to Carry Forward

We offer two candidates for the single sentence we hope every reader will remember a month from now. The community can choose which fits best, the short version or the longer one.

A player is not a rating, a player is a competitor who deserves to walk onto every court believing they have a chance.

Across three decades of coaching, playing, parenting, and observing this sport, we have come to believe the most powerful version of this idea is the following:

A player is not their rating. A player is a competitor, a person, and a young human being who deserves to walk onto every court believing they have a chance, and to walk off every court knowing the effort they brought was their own.

Acknowledgments

We thank the more than 90,000 subscribers of Match Tennis App whose conversations, questions, and stories have shaped the perspective expressed in this paper. We thank the coaches, parents, and players around the world who have shared their concerns about the cultural shift in junior tennis with us. We thank the great players and coaches of the past, and of the present, whose example continues to teach us, every Grand Slam season, that the highest level of the sport is not about a number.

We are listening. We are ready to reset. We hope you will join us.