Product Notes
What a Decision Score Actually Measures
A Decision Score is a single honest number with a verdict — not an oracle. Here is what goes into it, what it deliberately leaves out, and how to actually use it.
Every few weeks a junior player and their coach sit down with the same problem. There is a tournament on the calendar, maybe two or three that overlap, and a decision has to be made. Do we go?
It sounds simple until you write down everything the answer depends on. The grade of the event and whether it suits the player's current level. The surface, and whether the player actually wins on it. The entry list, and where the player's ranking falls within it. The points on offer if things go well. The flight, the nights in a hotel, the days out of school. Recent form. Whether the player has already played three weeks in a row.
That is a lot to hold in your head at once. So most people don't. They either drown in a spreadsheet, or they shrug and go with a feeling.
The Decision Score is our attempt at a third option.
The everyday problem
The honest version of the question is not "is this a good tournament." It is "is this a good tournament for this player, right now, given everything else on the table." Those are very different questions, and the second one is the one that actually gets asked the night before an entry deadline.
The information to answer it usually exists. It is just scattered. The ranking is on one site, the entry list on another, the surface buried in the tournament notes, the cost in a half-finished mental estimate. Pulling it together every single time is tedious, and tedium is where good decisions quietly go to die.
The point is not to invent certainty. It is to make the next conversation with a coach more specific.
So the goal we set ourselves was modest. Gather the scattered pieces, reason over them in a consistent way, and hand back something a player and coach can talk about in two minutes instead of twenty.
Why a single number with a verdict
There is a temptation, when you have a lot of data, to show all of it. A wall of statistics feels thorough. It also pushes the actual judgement back onto the reader, who now has to weigh ten numbers with no idea how they trade off against each other.
The opposite failure is the gut guess. Fast, but it forgets things — usually the boring things, like cost and accumulated fatigue, that matter most over a season.
A Decision Score sits between those two. It is a number out of 100, paired with a plain-language verdict. Something like "Worth considering — a reasonable option, weigh it against your other events." The number gives you a quick read. The verdict tells you what the number means in words, so nobody has to guess whether 64 is good.
The verdict is doing more work than the number, honestly. "Worth considering" is a different instruction from "strong fit" or "probably skip this one," and it is phrased to be weighed against alternatives rather than obeyed.
What actually goes into it
Under the score is an eight-factor model. I won't pretend each factor is a clean, independent dial — they interact — but the kinds of things it reasons over are concrete:
- Surface fit — the player's win rate by surface. Clay and hard are not interchangeable, and a player's record usually says so.
- Level and grade appropriateness — whether the event's grade (ITF J30 through J300, or the Tennis Europe categories) matches where the player is now, not where they hope to be.
- Entry chance — given the player's ranking and the current entry list, how likely it is they get into the draw at all.
- Points opportunity — what a realistic run could be worth.
- Travel and cost — the real-world friction of getting there and staying.
- Recent form and momentum — how the player has actually been playing.
- Schedule load — whether this stacks onto an already heavy block of weeks.
Acceptance and results sync from the player's ITF or Tennis Europe profile, so the form and ranking inputs reflect what really happened rather than what was typed in by hand.
The part most products skip
Here is the uncomfortable truth about every one of those factors: some of them are estimates, and an estimate without a confidence level is just a guess wearing a suit.
So the score is paired with an entry-chance estimate — a "% Entry" read — and, crucially, with a confidence level attached to any number we derive. Entry chance is an estimate. The points and cost figures are estimates. The Decision Score does not guarantee acceptance, and it certainly does not guarantee results. It cannot tell you that you'll get in, and it will never tell you that you'll reach a particular ranking.
Where we forecast, we forecast in ranges, not single points. A range is honest about uncertainty in a way a precise-looking number never is.
And when the data is too thin to say anything responsible — a sparse entry list, too few matches on a surface — the product hides the number rather than printing a confident-looking figure on top of nothing. That was a deliberate choice, and an awkward one, because a blank space looks less impressive than a bold percentage. We would rather show less and be trusted than show more and be wrong.
A number you can't trust is worse than no number, because it ends the conversation instead of starting one.
How to actually use it
The score lives on the Today tab as part of the Next Best Move, with Explore, Path, Radar, and Coach alongside it. But where it sits matters less than how you read it.
Use it as a tie-breaker, not an oracle. When two tournaments are genuinely close, the score and its factors give you a structured way to see why one edges ahead — maybe better surface fit, maybe a lighter travel load against an already full block. That is a far better starting point than "I just have a feeling about the clay one."
Use it as a conversation starter. A coach who sees a 58 with low entry confidence asks different questions than one who sees an 82. The score doesn't replace their judgement. It points it somewhere specific.
And treat a hidden number as information too. If the product won't show entry chance, that usually means the field is genuinely unpredictable — which is itself worth knowing before you book flights.
The human point
A Decision Score is not a verdict handed down from above. It is a compression of a messy, real decision into something two people can actually discuss before a deadline.
The player still chooses. The coach still coaches. The score just makes sure the boring, decisive details — surface, cost, fatigue, the entry list — are on the table where they belong, with an honest label on how sure we are about each one.
It exists to make a decision discussable. Not to make it for you.
About the author
Sofia Lindqvist is a sports scientist at NextPoint, where she works on player analytics and the recommendation engine. She spends most of her time on the unglamorous question of when a number is honest enough to show.