Your percentile is a value between 1 and 100 that indicates the percentage of players ranked below you. For instance, if you are ranked higher than 70% of all players, then you would be in the 70th percentile.
Why do you chart the percentile instead of the rank?
The number of ranked players in the TennisRecruiting.net lists changes from week to week, and the differences can be dramatic over long periods of time. For example, there may be only 500 players ranked before the busy summer season - and 1000 players ranked at the end. With these changes, your ranking may change significantly over long periods of time - and these changes are not necessarily correlated with your performance.
We have found that percentile does not fluctuate as widely as the raw rankings and better correlates with performance. Using percentiles makes the historical ranking charts more meaningful.
Why does the chart start at the 50th percentile?
The pool of players considered is much bigger than the players that we rank. Just meeting the eligibility requirements of our lists in terms of wins is an accomplishment. Since more than 50% of the players are ineligible across all classes, we decided to show from 50 to 100.
