How The Stack works
The Stack is StackedRoster's own ranking of college tennis players and teams. It's built independently from match results and designed to closely track the official ITA rankings — so you get a list you can trust, updated more often than the ITA posts theirs.
It's our ranking, not the official one
The Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) publishes the official college tennis rankings. The Stack is separate: we compute our own list and check it against the ITA's. We are not affiliated with the ITA, and when you want the authoritative list, we link you straight to it.
How we build it
We collect every Division I match result and let the players' wins and losses rank each other. Beating a strong opponent is worth more than beating a weak one — but how strong an opponent is depends on who theybeat, and so on. So we run the calculation in rounds, updating everyone's strength each round until the order settles. It's the same idea search engines use to rank pages by which other pages link to them.
Once the list settles, we fine-tune the very top using a points model we reverse-engineered from the ITA's published results, so our top players line up as closely as possible with theirs.
Why we track the ITA
The ITA list is the standard everyone in college tennis knows. By tuning The Stack to track it closely, our ranking stays familiar and credible — while adding things the official list doesn't give you:
- •More current. The ITA posts roughly once a week. We update between their posts, so The Stack reflects recent results sooner.
- •Deeper. The ITA publishes a limited number of players. The Stack ranks well beyond that, so lower-ranked players still show up.
- •Built for your phone. Fast, clean, and easy to browse on mobile.
How close are we?
Very close, but not identical — and we don't pretend otherwise. The ITA recalculates its entire list every time it publishes, so the small gap between our order and theirs shifts slightly from week to week. Rather than quote a single accuracy number that would quickly go stale, we show how the two lists compare for the current week right on the rankings page.