The UTP Rankings is the Ulster Tennis ranking system, introduced in 2008. These are separate from the Irish National rankings. The UTP rankings are held on a separate website which can be found at www.utpranking.co.uk.
UTP ranking points are awarded for all official Ulster tournaments, certain Irish tournaments, as well as ITF, ETA and LTA events.
A player’s ranking is based on the top 6 scoring tournaments they play during the season.
Ranking points are awarded based on the standard of players playing in each age group. Therefore if an event has strong players playing it will receive more ranking points than one with a weaker field.
The rankings are based on a “count” for the age group, this is calculated from the number of top 12 players in the age group who played in the event, and also the number of players in the event. This is then multiplied points for each finishing position in the tournament to give ranking points for all players. All players also received 10 ranking points for entering and playing a match in the event.
For example, in general the winner of a tournament receives 100 ranking points multiplied by the count for the event. A strong Ulster tournament with all top 12 players taking part would have a count of 20, and with a draw size of between 32 and 64 would add an extra three to the count giving 23. Therefore the winner would receive 2310 points.
Counts can be higher if there are strong players from outside Ulster taking part, for example National events in Ireland could have a count of 36, giving the winner around 4000 points depending on the size of the draw.
International (ITF and ETA) events can have very high counts as these feature a very high standard of player, and are also multiplied up further for higher grades of event (e.g. Category 1 ITF would be more than Category 5 events).
Details on how the points work can be found on the UTP Website here.
