For almost all junior tennis players, college tennis is as far as they will ever go in the sport.

It is the pinnacle for what most junior tennis players aspire to because of how — almost impossibly — difficult it is to make a living as a full-time pro in tennis. College tennis represents the apex, and the question of whether any given junior will ever be good enough to play at that level is one that comes up frequently. 

This might seem like a pretty straightforward question, and one that I get asked a lot, but the truth is that it’s hard to answer and depends on many different factors. Here are a few tips to help you think about the answer.

First, it’s important to understand that there are a few different levels of college tennis.

At the very top you have the power four conferences in Division 1. This includes: Big 10, Big 12, SEC, and ACC. Next you have Division 1 programs that are not in the power four, like the Patriot League or Ivy League. Following from there are: Division 2, NAIA, Division 3, and community college programs. As you can see there is a broad range of college divisions, and whether you can play at the college level depends a great deal on which level you are shooting for.

Thankfully, there is one very simple and accurate way to measure the competitiveness of a program and that is through UTR. Similar to something like track or swimming, it is easy to know how competitive any given team is based on the UTRs of the players that are on the roster. If, for example, your best time in the mile is 5 minutes, it will be hard to believe that you could make a team where the slowest miler is 4 minutes. Just look at the numbers and ask yourself whether you will be at that level by the time recruitment starts in either junior or senior year of high school. 

For discussion’s sake, let’s take a look at the extreme scenarios. To play Div 1 for a power four conference, the men’s UTR minimum is probably 11 (or maybe a high 10). At the high end of the lineup, for players in the most competitive of these programs, the UTRs are easily over 12 and sometimes even 13 or 14. There are, in fact, many students who play Div 1 tennis on their way to going pro, so this is an extremely competitive level of tennis that requires total dedication and elite athleticism. On the other hand, there are very small Div 3 programs where a UTR of 6 or 7 might have you make the team. Of course, the level of competition will always be higher at Division 1 programs because scholarships are offered and the spotlight is way brighter, but you can see there is a broad spectrum and plenty of room for everyone who wants to participate. 

Note that while I have illustrated the different levels of college tennis on the boy’s side, it is safe to assume a similar range of competition exists on the girl’s side as well. On the girls side, in order to play for a top Division 1 program, it likely requires a UTR of 10 but for small Division 3 programs, there are UTRs of 4 that are on the roster.

Now with that said, there are a lot more considerations than simply whether you will be able to make the roster somewhere.

First is that you will see in the non Div 1 power four conference schools, there is a strong connection between the quality of the school academically and the quality of the tennis programs. The Ivy League for example has some of the top tennis teams in the country year after year, even though their big ticket sport programs, like football and basketball are not big draws. The reality is that many students will use tennis as a way to be accepted into an academically selective school, and for this reason, the tennis teams tend to be very strong with UTR levels similar to those of schools in the power four.

Second, along those same lines, there are Div 3 tennis programs that rival lower rated Div 1 programs as far as UTR competitiveness is concerned. Academic power houses, like the University of Chicago or Claremont McKenna College have tennis teams (based on UTR) that rival some of the less rigorous Div 1 programs. The reasons are the same, which is that acceptance to these elite academic colleges has become more and more competitive (case in point: In 2025, there were more college applicants than at any other point in history!), and so applicants are using tennis as a way to standout and get accepted. 

A third consideration is the size of the team. What gets hard to predict is how many spots are going to be available on any given team at the time you graduate. College teams are usually quite small. A full roster might be 13 to 15 players, and that number has gotten even smaller for the elite Div 1 programs, thanks to some new laws enacted by Congress recently. Most teams like to have a balance of lower and upper classmen, which means from one year to the next there might only be 3 to 4 spots that are open for new incoming freshman. That is a VERY small number of spots given the large number of high school tennis players out there in the world! And when I say “world” I mean it, given the very large number of international students who come to the US to play tennis!

Knowing the landscape is a good first step to knowing whether you can play at the college level one day.

It sets a target for you to aim for if college tennis is a dream of yours. However, that is only one half of the equation. The other half is your abilities as a player. And this can also get very tricky to figure out. 

When a player decides to make college tennis a goal, one of the hardest questions to answer is a prediction as to what level can be reached when it’s time to be recruited. NCAA rules state that coaches can start communicating with players the summer after sophomore year. There are several reasons why I think this is totally insane, but the biggest is that the player is not fully developed at such a young age. He or she still has 2 full years (half their high school career) to see what their full potential might be. Be that as it may, the system is the system and so the first thing to be aware of is what your UTR is at the end of sophomore year. Most college tennis players needed to have started several years ahead of when recruiting would start, so by this age, they should have a good sense of their UTR. If you’re a 6 UTR and want to play Div 1, I’d say the chances of that happening are very low. If you’re a 9 UTR, I’d say the chances were solid as long as you continue to make tennis a high priority, and avoid injury.

There is no secret formula for trying to assess whether your talent level will be high enough to play collegiately.

Therefore, the most basic way to think about it is to try and predict what level of UTR you feel you can reach by the beginning of your senior year in high school, and to be as realistic as possible about this. Here are a few examples of what I mean by this taking it from the perspective of boy’s tennis … 

If you just started tennis, and reached a 5 or 6 UTR after a few months of intermittent practice as a high school freshman, there is a chance you are a natural. With total dedication and strong coaching, it would not be realistic to reach a 9 UTR over the next four years, which would put you in the running for a decent Div 3 program.

If, on the other hand, you have needed to scrap and claw your way to a 4 UTR as a freshman, after hours of clinic each week and expensive high performance coaching, it would be hard to foresee a pathway to 7 UTR, which would prove difficult to make it onto even a small Div 3 program.

At the other end of the spectrum, to have a decent chance at playing in a Division 1 program at the time of graduation, I have yet to see anyone get there without at least an 8 UTR as a freshman. Of course, nothing is impossible, but given how few spots there are on men’s tennis teams and the “improvement through repetition” nature of tennis, it seems highly unlikely to reach a high 11 or 12 UTR at the beginning of senior year, unless that solid foundation is built early. 

There are exceptions to every general rule, so I am sure there are plenty of exceptions to what I have just shared. There are also many other factors such as injury, recruiting year, whether you decide to take a gap year, etc., which can all play a big part in whether you can get your level high enough to make a roster somewhere. But hopefully this is a helpful, high-level primer that provides some perspective on how to set expectations on college tennis.