World Tennis Number (WTN) is increasingly being used in college tennis to determine seeding and qualification for the biggest events.
This year, it will be the basis of seeding for the NCAA men’s and women’s singles championship draws. It also determines qualification for the ITA Sectionals coming up, for spots that have not already been claimed via high-placement in All Americans or respective ITA Regionals. So WTN can have a big impact on players’ seasons in the fall.
Problems arise when your players and fans lack confidence in the official rating system. Unrest seems to have died down in recent years, but when WTN was first implemented in college tennis and fully adopted in 2023, there was much vocal opposition. Just look at this twitter comment section from 2024:
“WTN is garbage. No one takes it seriously. A shame that WTN is being forced on USTA/ITF/ITA.”
“WTN is incredibly stupid. I can work to be the highest or 2nd highest ranked in the tournament but due to them wanting to shove this down our throat I’m not even seeded. What a joke!”
Three years after its official adoption, the ITA stands by WTN. And ITA CEO David Mullins says its metrics have improved over the years and it’s a matter of getting used to the new system. WTN, arriving in 2021, is young compared to its greatest competitor, UTR (Universal Tennis Rating), which was created in 2008.
“There were a lot of issues with the WTN early on that have been resolved for the most part now,” Mullins said. “People get used to using one thing, don’t necessarily want to use another, but WTN is growing rapidly across the world.”
The International Tennis Federation (ITF), which recently re-branded to World Tennis, launched WTN in order to make player ratings available across the globe.
“UTR is maybe in 27 countries, whereas WTN is gonna be in something like 150 countries,” Mullins said. “So [UTR] definitely has a huge following here in America, but across the world, WTN is starting to gain some traction.”
On the UTR website, the private company states that their database contains results from over 5 million matches in 202 countries and is “a truly international system.”
As far as questions of accuracy, a study published in the Wharton Sports Analytics Journal from the Fall of 2025 showed UTR’s prediction model to be 4% more accurate than WTN — 78.5% vs. 74.2%. But since then, WTN has presumably closed the gap some after implementing game-level scores in 2026, similar to UTR. A set won 6-4 now counts the same as 6-0 for WTN, but it used to not factor that in.
After a NCAA Division I Tennis Championships Subcommittee meeting in July, WTN will be used to seed the national championships instead of the ITA ranking, which is determined by college matches. That comes after reigning champion Michael Zheng (Columbia) entered last year’s championships unseeded after only playing the Conference Masters event to qualify.
“The last couple of years, the NCAA committee actually used our ITA rankings in November, even against our advice because we do not believe the ITA rankings are as accurate as we would like them to be in November because there’s so few matches that are being played,” Mullins said. “And so you had somebody like Michael Zheng last year that wasn’t seeded because he only played one qualifying event and actually didn’t complete that event who obviously was defending his NCAA title and went on to win it. If they’d used WTN, Michael Zhang would have been the No. 1 seed. So the WTN for seating purposes is a much better direction for the NCAA tennis committee to go this year and future years.”
WTN will be used by the ITA and NCAA to determine qualification and seeding for events, but coaches and players will likely stay reliant on UTR for recruiting purposes.
“Coaches have really enjoyed UTR,” Mullins said. “They’ve gotten to familiarize themselves with it. They know how to use it, they trust it quite a lot, uh, in respect to, to recruiting. I think it’s gamified as well, right? Junior players like to look at their rating, just like adults look at their stock portfolio and see what’s gone up, what’s gone down almost on a daily basis. And I think there’s a huge head start there.”
In May of this year, UTR ended its agreement with TennisRecruiting.net for the site to use UTR in its recruiting rankings. The move marks a push to get consumers using UTR’s own ranking product and recruiting tools.
“We remain open to working with UTR in the future,” Admin at TennisRecruiting.net stated. “If UTR decides to make rating and tournament data available to TRN again in a workable format, we would be happy to revisit this decision. In the meantime, TRN rankings will continue to be based on USTA and ITF results.”
With WTN continuing to improve its algorithm and UTR moving in the direction of exclusivity, expect their trajectories to continue on the current path. At some point though, something will have to give as they look to occupy the same space.
