DUPR Guide: How/When to use and report

DUPR is the official rating system of Pickleball.com and the most popular rating system used in Pickleball.  The following Guide will take you through the important information to ask yourself if using DUPR is the right choice for you.

Should I report my results to DUPR?

Pickleballtournaments.com and Pickleballleagues.com offer their directors the ability to use DUPR ratings without reporting results to DUPR from the event. A couple of questions you should ask yourself are:

• Is the event focused on Competitive play or Fun?
• Are my events going to be Open Skill or broken down by Skill level?
• Am I willing to police player ratings if someone signs up and is not in the correct level?

It is our recommendation that if you are just looking to host a laid back/fun focused style of event for a fundraiser that you should consider NOT reporting results back to DUPR.  Most players look at their official results and track those from competitive play and may not want to participate in an event unless the results will not be shared with DUPR.

Either way you decide to go, we HIGHLY recommend that you display your intentions in the tournament description to let players know ahead of time.

IMPORTANT: DUPR requires that in order to send results to them that 100% of the players in the tournament are linked to DUPR accounts.  This decision should be made BEFORE YOU OPEN REGISTRATION.  If you decide after you wish to report your results, you will need to contact all the players in the tournament that have not linked a DUPR account before we will intervene and make changes to the software and allow for the sending of the results.

What are the Increment ratings and what they mean?

Pickleballtournaments.com and Pickleballleagues.com focus on a .5 increment rating for their events.  These increments start at 1.0 and go all the way up to 8.0.  The most common Tournament and League ratings start at 2.5 and run through 5.0.  A player rating in the 6.0+ range would be considered Pro level.

There is a lot of confusion on what a .5 increment rating means and what ratings are included in that.  For this example, lets use an event labeled: Men's skill 3.0.  It is very important to know that a 3.0 rating would include all players rated from 3.00 up to 3.49.  Once the player hits that next .5 increment (3.5) they would move up to the next scale.

Below are the commonly used event names and what skill levels they would include:

• Men's Doubles: Skill 3.0 and below - This means that all players with a rating of 3.49 and below are able to sign up for this skill event as a 3.49 player is still considered a 3.0 player until they surpass the 3.5 increment
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• Men's Doubles: Skill 3.0 and above - This means that all players with a starting rating of 3.0 and all the way up to 8.0 would be allowed to participate.  Because 3.00 is the lowest rating available withing that .5 increment, that is the starting rating for this event 
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• Men's Doubles: Skill 3.0 - In this case the event works as an "Only" setup with players only in the 3.0 increment range (starting at 3.00 and ending at 3.49)

The software offers the ability to allow for players of lower skill to sign up in a .5 increment event if they Tournament Onwer so chooses.  The software will NOT allow players to play down in skill ever.

If you are going to allow players to play up in skill, what should I consider?

As the sport grows,ws we run into a lot of new players constantly coming onto the scene and into events for the first time or with only a few events worth of results included in a rating.  Below are some of the Pro's and Con's to allowing players to "Play Up" above their listed ratings.

Pros: 

Allows players to play better competition they may not get the chance to in rec play.

If a players rating has a low accuracy rating they are able to still sign up for what they believe is their correct level of play

Allows less restrictions at Registration for the tournament owner

Cons:

Allowing players of lower skill to play up can deter serious players from registering for an event

If a lower skill level player beats a higher skill player their rating will have a more drastic rise/fall

What is the best way to set up an event to allow players to play up?

You have two ways to allow players to play "Up" in the software.  The first is to set the event up as "And Above" as indicated above.  This will start the increment at the lowest possible point and let all players above that increment sign up.  

The other option would be to set the event up as "Only" but then select the option to allow lower skill levels to play up to that level.  In this situation the select increment is used as the cap for skill level.  In the bottom example the highest skill level allowed for the event would be 3.49 since that is the top of the .5 increment for 3.0.

Things to consider on updating player ratings before the events start and how to do that

The normal event registration for a Tournament averages about 2 months.  A lot can take place in that two months and skill levels can change.  When a player signs up for a tournament, the skill level they had at that time is "locked in" and will not change unless you choose to make that change.

Under the "Attendees" tab, you will find player registration with a lot of event skill level information listed.  We have 2 indicators that are important to look at here:

1. The green indicator below on "self" indicates that Self is the rating that is being used for the tournament as the first ratings choice.

2. The grey rating to the left of the players event title means that is the rating that is being used for that event.  If you want to adjust/change that, you have the ability to make that change per player.  I will review that below.

In the example of the top rating, you can see that "self" is the rating choice being used by the tournament, but DUPR is the rating used for the event selection.  That means that at the time of the players registration, the tournament owner had DUPR as the main rating system.

To adjust the rating to the left of the event, you have a couple of options.  

1. to ONLY adjust the one event, use the 3 dots to the left of that event and select "update event rating." 

2. If you want to update the rating used on all of that players ratings, you can use the "Menu" button then "Update