Brian Meadows relied on getting lucky every time he wanted to play a game of tennis.
He’d walk down to his local court, searching for another lonely player. This strategy didn’t always work out.
“Tennis is something where you need to have a partner,” Meadows said. “It’s not fun when you don’t have a partner and you end up just swinging and having to chase the balls yourself.”
The pianist and teacher took matters into his own racquet-holding hands and taught himself to code his app, Rankd.
Rankd Tennis North America, launched in Toronto in August 2021, connects tennis players of various skill levels to compete against each other on public courts. It has more than 3500 active users across 30 cities and more than 400 users in the Ottawa area.
Sam Meurice, one of the first 100 people to use the app, now works at Rankd as a full-stack developer for its website and app. He said his experience using Rankd streamlined the process of finding tennis matches and prompted him to join the start-up company.
“Before, I had to look up on Facebook Toronto’s tennis players’ group,” Meurice said. “You have to… figure out if [users are] close to you, you have to figure out if their timeline matches up to yours, figure out what skill level they are—a bunch of extra planning goes into it.”
Now, he says finding a match is easy.
Upon downloading the app, users are prompted to select their home court—the closest public court near them—and their skill level, allowing users to choose between beginner, intermediate, advanced and pro.
Once a user completes the setup portion of the app, they enter the “duel arena,” where they can request to play against other players that match their specific criteria—such as time, skill and location.
If both players agree to play each other, the app’s algorithm will find a public court that’s located in between both players’ home courts and a time that works for both players.
At the end of the match, both players enter the score to their respective accounts. The Rankd app suggests players do so immediately after the game. Based on the score, the app will move users up and down tier ranks.
Meurice said the honour-score system is quite common in tennis. Most public courts don’t have line umpires and officials to score the game, so players will have to keep track of the score and officiate themselves.
But Meurice understands the concerns of users potentially making up scores. He said he had his own concerns about the self-scoring system at first, but has never had problems as a user or full-stack developer.
“The primary motivator for people using the app is ‘I want to play tennis [and] I want an easy to way do it.’ This is the easiest [and fastest] way,” Meurice said.
Rankd Tennis North America offers a few tennis competitions during the summer months for anyone to play and compete in, but Meurice said the app remains largely recreational with only a slight competitive edge.
The team extended its reach to Ottawa in the summer. Pooja Durgum, the director of operations at Rankd, said it was a relatively successful experience after reaching out to Ottawa tennis Facebook groups and posting on various Ottawa Reddit pages to promote the app.
Despite its growth, the app still has room for improvement, according to Meadows and Meurice. One area in particular, is fixing the chat feature that Meadows programmed in 2021.
“Currently the messaging system on the app is a little bogged-down [and] not super fluid to use,” Meadows said.
To solve this, Rankd has a group of developers working on redesigning the app before the summer tennis season begins..
“The app will feel way better. It’s [being] rebuilt from the ground up so it’s way faster,” Meurice said. “It’s going to be a really nice messaging system with read receipts and typing indicators.”
In response to user feedback, Meadows said he’s also looking to incorporate a ‘news centre’ into the upcoming app update.
One of Rankd’s goals, Meadows said, is to make tennis more accessible to those who can’t afford the sport’s normally high fees.
“[Club membership fees] can range from $800 to $5000 a year, so it’s not a cheap sport to play,” Meadows said. “Our target audience are the people that walk by a tennis court and always wish to play. We’re trying to give them that access at a very low, if anything, cost.”
An earlier version of this article misspelled Sam Meurice’s last name as “Sam Maurice.” The Charlatan regrets the error.
Featured graphic by Sara Mizannojehdehi.
