Your tennis rating is a lie, and if you’re being honest with yourself, you already know it.
Unfortunately, most tennis players have this backwards.
Your rating isn’t about how modern your forehand looks, how many RPMs you’re generating, or what grip you use.
It’s about one thing: results.
Let me introduce you to Harry Herszog.
He’s 68 years old. As of today, he’s ranked number 12 in Texas and number 28 in the nation in 35 singles.
In 2019, he made the finals of the Texas State Championship.
In 2021, he won three matches at nationals before falling in the quarterfinals, in a third-set tiebreaker, to a 22-year-old.
That puts Harry at the very top of the 3.5 level.
In my honest opinion, he’s not really a 3.5 player anymore.
No offense to him, but how do you call someone a 3.5 when he’s holding his racket halfway up the grip and still beating players half his age?
Here’s the part that should actually surprise you.
His official rating says 3.5.
So who’s actually lying about their rating here?
Definitely not Harry.
It’s the thousands of players on local courts and in YouTube comments who claim they’re a 4.0, a 4.5, or even a 5.0, simply because they think they look the part.
They swing hard. They use the right racket. They talk a good game.
But when it’s time to actually post results? Crickets.
That’s the real lie. One they tell themselves just as much as everyone around them.
At the core of this problem is a gap between feel and real.
If you’ve ever filmed yourself playing, you already know exactly what I mean.
In the moment, your swing feels fast. Your footwork feels smooth. The ball feels like it’s rocketing off your strings.
Then you watch the video back, and suddenly everything looks like it’s moving in slow motion.
It barely even looks like you.
Video isn’t a normal part of tennis culture the way it is in golf, which means very few players have any real self-awareness about what their game actually looks like.
That lack of awareness is exactly what leads players to judge and criticize others who are, honestly, better competitors than they are.
Here’s the second major problem.
Very few players actually compete the way Harry does.
Roughly 25.7 million people played tennis in the US last year.
Only about 680,000 of them played in any official USA league.
Globally, UTR has just 800,000 rated players out of hundreds of millions of people who’ve picked up a racket.
That means well over 90 percent of tennis players have never received a single verified rating.
Just guesses. Self-assessments. Or the classic, “my coach says I’m a 4.0.”
Your coach can absolutely evaluate your technical proficiency inside a lesson environment.
But anyone who’s actually competed knows the prettiest strokes don’t win every match.
There are dozens of other competitive variables at play. Focus under pressure. Fitness. Score and tempo management. Tactical adjustments. Momentum swings. Gamesmanship. Weather. Annoying opponent styles. The list goes on.
To be clear, technique absolutely still matters.
There’s a real point where poor technique will cap how far you can go.
But for most players watching this, technique isn’t actually the limiting factor right now.
There’s lower-hanging fruit. Decision-making. Consistency. Court positioning. How you handle pressure.
Those things decide match outcomes just as much, if not more, than how clean your forehand looks on camera, which is exactly what everyone loves to obsess over instead.
Here’s the bottom line.
Poor self-awareness combined with a lack of real competitive exposure breeds overconfidence, ignorance, and judgment across the tennis community.
Honestly, it makes me sad to watch play out, even here on my own channel.
That’s exactly why I made this video. Not to change every mind out there, but to bring a little clarity and awareness to something that quietly fuels so much of the negativity in comment sections and on local courts.
So here’s my question for you.
Have you ever been misjudged on the court? Or have you misjudged someone else based purely on how they looked?
Tell me your story in the comments below. I know the rest of this community would love to hear it too.
Your Coach,
-Ian
