Welcome to Season 12 Episode 19 of the ParentingAces Podcast, a proud member of the Tennis Channel Podcast Network. This week, Lisa chats with Australian tennis enthusiast, Ric Curnow, about his solution to players ducking matches because of a potential negative impact on their UTR.

Since the dawn of junior tennis ratings and rankings, we've seen players opt out of certain tournaments or matches due to fear of losing to a lower-ranked or lower-rated player. Rather than focusing on the benefits to be gained from playing any and all matches, some coaches, parents, and players only focus on outcomes which doesn't serve anyone well.

Ric saw this happening over and over again with Tennis Australia tournaments and wanted to create a solution that could show players (and parents and coaches!) whether a match would be UTR-positive, UTR-neutral, or UTR-negative based on the ratings of the two players involved and the resulting final score. Tennis Neutral was born!

Players can now input their own UTR and that of their upcoming opponent to:

• See the ratio of games that would return a neutral UTR result.
• See the minimum percentage of games in a match that generates positive UTR outcomes for both players.
• Enter match results to check if a result is UTR positive for either player.

Ric's hope is this will reduce the stress around the unknowables of the UTR algorithm and reduce the number of withdrawals as a result of that stress. Tennis Neutral is a useful tool for coaches wanting to monitor a player's performance under differing circumstance or setting up training sessions between players at different levels. It’s an aid for any serious player, and especially for any prospective college-level player.

As an added bonus, Ric donates all proceeds from the app's purchase to the Nick Kyrgios Foundation which offers sporting opportunities to underprivileged youth in Australia. It's a great cause and should make purchasing the Tennis Neutral app a no-brainer!

For more information and to get the app, visit the Tennis Neutral website at https://www.tennisneutral.com/index.html. If you have additional questions for Ric, you can reach him via email at ric.curnow@anti-bias.com.

If you’re so inclined, please share this – and all our episodes! – with your tennis community. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via your favorite podcast app. If you haven’t already, be sure to become a Member of ParentingAces by visiting https://parentingaces.com/membership-join. And check out our logo’d merch as well as our a la carte personal consultations in our online shop (Premium Members received FREE SHIPPING every day!). To support ParentingAces' work with a financial donation of any size via PayPal, click here.

CREDITS

Intro & Outro Music: Morgan Stone aka STØNE

Audio & Video Editing: Lisa Stone

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