There are lots of ways to find out what your pickleball rating is.
And there are plenty of different criteria, figured in a variety of ways. The wild thing about pickleball ratings is they are both subjective and also can be objective.
Players can self-rate, and assign themselves any level they want if they are entering a tournament, or players can be evaluated in a number of different scenarios to determine a more accurate rating. Both self-rating and an official rating are deemed acceptable.
If you’re getting set to enter your first tournament and don’t know what your rating should be, the best way to get started in rating yourself is to check out USA Pickleball’s skill assessment sheets.
You can always self-rate your game and enter a tournament as a beginner or at any other level. If you’re interested in self-rating, here’s an easy breakdown of each skill set.
Ratings
1.0-2.0 player if you’re just starting to play and have no other sports background.
2.5 – A player who has limited experience and can sustain a short rally.
3.0 – Is someone who understands the fundamentals as well as court positioning.
3.5 – Would be someone who knows the differences between the hard and soft game. This person also moves quickly to the non-volley zone and also understands the benefits of “stacking.”
4.0 – This player is able to identify and attack weaknesses from the other team. This player is also aware of their partner’s position on the court and is able to move as a team with their partner.
4.5 – This player understands strategy, has good footwork, can communicate well, and move efficiently with their partner.
5.0 – This rating is for a person who has mastered strategy and can easily play a fast or slow game.
Each rating also comes with a set of skills that require proficiency to move up.
UPTR Ratings
If you want a sanctioned and official rating, the UPTR is considered the standard in pickleball ratings. It is used by USA Pickleball for sanctioned tournaments. The rating is calculated by your play at USA Pickleball-sanctioned tournaments.
The UPTR rating can be a 2-digit or 4-digit number. The 4-digit number is used for tournament seeding purposes. The 2-digit number is standard and is more common. Both numbers can be accessed if you’ve played in a tournament by visiting your USAPA.org member profile. You will have to join the USAPA to play in a sanctioned tournament.
Games with your friends at your local park or community courts, considered “Recreational matches” do not figure into your UTPR rating. Your rating is also not affected by tournaments that use pickleballtournaments.com software to run their events.
The UTPR rating is way more accurate than self-rating and that’s valuable for beginners who want to get involved in tournaments. However, one of the downsides to the UTPR rating is that the scores of the matches used to calculate the final number are not considered. Only the win or the loss factors in and that can ultimately lead to not being the most-accurate metric.
In addition to self-rating and UTPR, DUPR is another criterion for rating purposes. DUPR (Dynamic Universal Pickleball Ratings) was developed in 2021 by Steve Kuhn, who also is the founder of Major League Pickleball. DUPR is used by every PPA player on tour and is available for all amateurs too. The app is a free download to your phone.
DUPR’s aim is to get a more accurate rating system for all players. It figures your rating based on results, regardless of event, location, tournament, or whatever. And the best thing about DUPR’s rating system is the fact it continually updates. It factors in not only if you won, but how many points were scored. It figures in if the game was a tournament, a league match, or just a practice, recreational game with friends.
DUPR is certainly more accurate than a self-rating and is more consistent than the UTPR. All a player has to do is find a match, get everyone on the court to agree that it will be recorded, play away and then enter the results when the match is completed. DUPR matches during practice games can add a level of intensity that is sometimes hard to replicate outside of tournament play.
The downside of DUPR is that not everyone uses it. Although it is getting more popular, there are still lots of players who aren’t interested or don’t know about DUPR.
All three types of rating systems can help you get an accurate reading on your skill level for either doubles or singles.
USAPA ratings
There are also aptitude tests one can use to help determine a rating. Consider the following skills from USAPA and see where you might fall with your abilities. Here are some of the highlights of the criteria for each skill level:
A 2.0 player has an understanding of the rules, knows how to keep score, can demonstrate a forehand, backhand, volley, and serve accurately into the correct spot. That person also knows where to stand when serving and returning.
A 2.5 player knows the basic rules and the two-bounce rule, can hit a forehand and backhand with direction, is accurate with the serve, is able to sustain a dink rally, can volley with some direction, understands fundamentals, and can accurately keep score.
A 3.0 player can hit a medium-paced forehead and backhand, can serve with depth and accuracy, can control a dink rally, can hit a medium-paced third-shot drop, and can hit a medium-paced volley with direction as well as understanding the fundamentals of the game, positioning and has played in tournaments.
A 3.5 player can use a forehand and backhand with a moderate level of control, can consistently get the serve in, return the serve in, can serve deep, and can return the serve deep. This player can also sustain medium-length dink rallies, can control the height and depth of dink shots, and understands the variation of pace for dink shots.
A 4.0 player has all of the skills above and is accurate on overhead shots, can sustain a dink rally with control, height and pace, consistently executes third-shot drops from the baseline, and is able to change soft shots to power shots and then back to soft. A 4.0 player can also block and return fast, hard volleys and is always aware of their partner’s position on the court.
A 4.5 player can do all of the above and can set up shots to generate errors from the other team, recognizes and attempts to hit attackable dinks, poaches effectively, has effective lobs, good footwork, and is comfortable playing at the non-volley zone line as well as understanding strategy and can adjust during the game.
A 5.0 player has all of those skills above and has them mastered, can serve in a variety of ways with power and accuracy, mastered the dink shot, and exhibits patience during a rally.
All of the above, no matter what system you use to establish a rating, is a great way to get involved in singles, doubles, and tournament play. It allows a degree of consistency that works in whatever place you are playing. Often, courts are divided for recreational play based on skill. If you know your skill, you are more than likely to not just be comfortable, but also likely to have a better time.
Playing in games with highly skilled players when you’re just a beginner isn’t a lot of fun for any of the participants, but finding a game where players are of like skill is rewarding, a chance for some good exercise, and can be competitively fun.
Knowing your skill rating will add to your enjoyment of the game, get you set for tournaments and allow you to connect with pickleball players on any court at any destination.
Transcript
00:00
What’s happening Pickleball Nation? Dave Fleming here with Connor Pardoe, the CEO of the Carvana PPA Tour and Brad Carroll, the president of Acrytech Sports Surfaces.
00:11
And we are so excited about bringing some standards to our sport and making those courts perfect for you to play on. I know you guys love playing so Connor,
00:21
let’s start with you. How did you get involved with Acrytech and what has this partnership enabled the tour to be able to do so that you have great courts for these wonderful pros to play on? Yeah, I mean that’s a great question, Dave.
00:35
And it’s really been a long history with Brad and his team in Acrytech Sports Surfaces and they’ve done a lot for the pickleball community. When the PPA Tour was started, one of the big logistical issues were there wasn’t enough pickleball facilities and places to hold the tournaments that we were looking to hold and be able to create the environment and atmosphere we were trying to create. And so one big thing that we’ve done is we’ve come in and
00:58
we’ve retrofitted so many tennis facilities, big, big tennis facilities that hold big tennis events throughout the years where Brad and his team they’ll provide the paint and the material and help us coordinate with an install crew and we’ll actually flip these tennis centers over to pickleball venues for the weekends. You know, obviously we’re very fortunate that the sport has grown so much over the past three or four years that now all these
01:25
facilities are starting to be built and you know, Brad and I kind of looking at each other like we need to create a standard, we need to make sure that we’re keeping the integrity of the game and something that we can really put a stamp of approval on so we can make sure that this rapid growing sport that all these courts and these new parks and facilities and locations where we will hold events will really meet official standard that should be set for all
01:48
pickleball players that get to play on those courts. No, I love it and I think you know as a player myself you want to feel like from tournament to tournament your experience is going to be the same. So Brad, what areas are you looking to standardize so that as municipalities, as people even in their individual homes we’re seeing that crop up everywhere. I love it. What are the areas where you say this is what we’ve got to have and where are those standards going to be?
02:14
Absolutely. So from a court standpoint what we found over the years is that when players would get on courts that we did not surface they would complain they’re a little too slick and based on the specs for our surfaces with tennis we found that players in pickleball thought that it was a little too slick.
02:33
So getting the right amount of texture in the product which varies from court to court. Standardizing that, making sure we’re consistent and the sand that we ship and how much goes in it. I know it doesn’t sound like much but when you’re mixing water and paint and sand if you don’t get the ratio right it can be much more smooth than you would like and that was a big complaint even when we were out here this time the the lines are a little slick so we’ve been working
03:01
with the PPA and with Connor directly to make sure that we’re developing products specifically for them that meet what the pros like and what they’re used to so that no matter where they go to play it’s the same surface time and time again. So you’ve got what the court surface is like I know there’s a lot of other things that we would want to see standardized here so take me into the width of the quarter because I have actually shown up at way too many parks
03:32
I hate when I see it no one knows pickleball so you literally have the baseline and then two feet and there’s a fence and you can’t even play and it makes me so sad to see a great place to play and it’s playable. Absolutely so many of these facilities as Connor was saying they were designed and developed for tennis and when we go in and try and fit enough pickleball courts in there to meet their demand it gets tight so a lot of this is going to come
04:01
down to it it’s just going to take time and planning is finding the facilities such as lifetime to have big enough areas where we can get the courts in there and make them fit. You can get four pickleball courts on one tennis but that’s not going to meet a pro standard so we have to be careful and how many we we put in and where they are. Yeah I think another another thing to look at is we want the sport to continue to grow and to be able to grow fast and obviously
04:28
it’s a no-brainer that retrofitting tennis courts has been something that has been able to help the sport really skyrocket because we’re talking about being able to repurpose something that maybe wasn’t used as much as it should be rather than starting from the ground zero so for us we understand that we need to keep that integrity because we want the sport to continue to grow but it’s how can we help these facilities how can we help you know these cities and
04:51
states and individual private builders understand how much space they need to have while still making it possible to retrofit courts and move forward and so I think we’re looking something kind of like a good better best as well where there’s kind of a minimum-standard a standard-standard and then a professional-standard that will be outweighing for everybody here. That’s exciting and I think you know we don’t want people guessing so that’s what we’re gonna be
05:17
looking at here is get the information which will be coming out in the next couple of months from these experts and then you’ll know how to do it now Brad I know you have something else so we let’s tease it a little bit we’re not ready for the full announcement but you have an exciting extension to all this, don’t you? We do actually so we’ve been working with Connor and his team and the PPA to put together a cushioned surface for pickleball and it’s been a long time
05:46
in development and we think we have finally achieved that we debuted just a little bit last year a couple of courts who rolled out at the Vegas tournament and Mandalay Bay and it was a huge success we put in a few at some private facilities and some private residents and got a bunch of feedback from some pros and they seem to love it so it’s coming.
06:09
Connor if you want to announce it, you can or we can wait? Yeah so the PPA tour will be endorsing an official cushioned court surface which will be provided by Acrytech and it’ll be our official cushioned surface of the PPA tour and also of the pickleball.com groups and it’s something we’re really excited about because it’s gonna help with longevity it’s gonna help be a little bit easier on joints of people that are playing pickleball and
06:35
obviously the most important is that it plays great, it plays wonderful and I think we’re gonna see a lot of facilities putting these in over the next few months. That is awesome I played on that court I know how good it is so I’m with you as you want my endorsement you’ve got it. So and the other great thing about that obviously the the play and the wear and tear on the body but also as you mentioned we played that in a convention center at Mandalay Bay so there’s so
07:03
many new places as we’re looking for where can I play pickleball everybody wants to play we’re gonna be able to put these down in a lot of different places. Absolutely we have a lot of clubs we’ve already been out to spec and look at and they’re excited about it so as those roll out I’m sure we’ll be making announcements as they come in. So we want more courts these guys are gonna help deliver them so you do it right listen to these guys they’re the experts so
07:28
thanks so much so much more to come on this topic thanks for watching.
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