Social Tennis Pyramid Six Months in!

The Social Tennis Pyramid competition has now been running for six months, so I thought I would reflect on progress-to-date.

The overall aim of the pyramid is to increase tennis participation, by making it really easy to play competitive matches against someone of your own standard. The pyramid structure accurately reflects the nature of tennis standards, be it within the world, your country, your city or your club. One person is the best, there's a couple of people almost as good, then a few more nearly as good as them...all the way down to the lower tiers where there are loads of players roughly the same standard.

There are 217 players on the pyramid today with every single British Tennis Rating from 1.1 to 10.2, so it's fair to say we have all standards from social, park-based players to nationally ranked ITF Futures Qualifiers (the lowest tier of professional tennis). Only 14 ladies compared to 203 men, so sadly still very much male orientated, however, I am very pleased with entries to-date and the continued growth of the competition.

New features continue to be added, thanks to my brilliant web developer from Poland. You can now view a leaderboard with players ordered by their win/loss ratio. You can also filter this by duration: 7 days, 30 days, 60 days or G.O.A.T. ...if you are unsure what G.O.A.T. stands for it's Greatest Of All Time, so in this case the person who has the most wins since the pyramid began six months ago....that just so happens to be myself at the moment!

A doubles pyramid was added just last week, for players who wish to team up and unleash their inner Jamie Murray. The doubles pyramid runs completely stand-alone, so wins at singles don't impact your doubles standing. Simply challenge three other players, they will get email notifications and when they accept the challenge contact details will be shared. I would recommend setting up a small whatsapp group to finalise the venue and time of the match.

With the new International Tennis Number due to be launched in 2020, for the first time ever you will have both a singles and doubles measure. It will be very exciting to see these matches help populate the new rating system, alongside your regular club's team matches. It has been a drawback of the old system for far too long that you have guys rated 9.2 and 10.2 playing in the top divisions of most county doubles leagues. In the new world, but using the old format, they would still be 9.2 at singles but 4.1 or 5.1 at doubles.

Another fantastic milestone for the competition is that we had our first partner club adopt the application to replace their internal singles league. Westside Lawn Tennis Club, one of Surrey's largest and most prestigious clubs are now using the automated software with over 75 players. This will remove some of the club manager's admin, as there's no need to refresh mini-leagues with promotion and relegation every 2-3 months. I also hope it encourages some of the better players to join, as there's only demand to play one match per month, unlike the usual 5-6 matches in a mini-league. I've been guilty myself of not playing enough matches in the top division, dropping down and then not being motivated to play the division two players to get back to the top division. I'm sure a lot of clubs struggle to get their first and second team players involved in their singles leagues.

The regular match play events have also been very well attended. Rotating around London and rotating between midweek and weekends. It's almost like a mini-tour, you can see the full future schedule of these on the social tennis website www.socialtennis.co.uk

I host as many events as I can and they are free to attend for pyramid competition entrants. These events are an excellent way to quickly meet other players while also offering the host clubs a chance to showcase their facilities to potential new members. So far the events have all been singles, using the FAST4 scoring format, with winners playing winners and losers playing losers. However I will be looking forward to arranging some doubles events in the near future now that the doubles functionality has been added.

To summarise, I'm very excited about the progress I've made in the last six months and can't wait to keep adding new features to help tennis players, like myself, keep playing competitive matches as much as their schedule allows!

Please get in touch if you would like to discuss using the pyramid software for your own club, county, country or national association.