Rating and Ranking Method for Soft Tennis

Abstract

Soft tennis originated in Japan, is selected as a club activity by many junior and high school students. Several senior elite-level competitions, e. g., nationwide amateur club championships, have been held regularly. These competitions, however, have no clear order of importance between them. Moreover, any ranking of players or pairs based on mathematical evidence has not been established. This paper proposes a novel ranking method for elite-level soft tennis players using match results. The proposed method is based on Colley's method, which can include the opponent and the margin of victory of every match in strength evaluation. The validity of the proposed method is verified based on its prediction performance.