Cebu's pickleball scene has grown fast over the past year, but there's no standardized way to classify players by skill level. That absence fed a familiar set of complaints, from mismatched divisions to accusations of sandbagging, where stronger players deliberately lower their standing to compete against beginners.
PickleRank Philippines, or PickleRank PH aims to address this issue by giving a more localized spin on a pickleball rating system designed specifically for Cebu's local community.
Who Built It
PickleRank PH is developed by the father-daughter team Howard and Althea Lazarte. Howard Lazarte said the idea grew out of watching organizers struggle year after year to find a reliable, objective way to determine where a player belonged in a bracket.
According to Lazarte, the system draws inspiration from the globally recognized Dynamic Universal Pickleball Rating (DUPR) but was built specifically with the Philippine pickleball community in mind.
In an interview, he mentioned:
"We need to have our own rankings sa Philippines kay walay mo-oversee."
Translation: We ned to have our own ranking system in the Philippines because nobody will oversee"
How the Rating System Works
PickleRank PH splits player ratings into two separate tracks:
- Personal rating: Reflects a player's general skill level based on ongoing match history and matchmaking activity.
- Matchmaking rating: Used to pair players of similar ability for casual or social play.
Tournament results are tracked in an entirely separate layer. A player's performance in a specific competition does not feed back into their personal or matchmaking rating. That separation is the detail organizers seem to care about most, since it closes the loophole that let players quietly tank their rating to slide into a lower, easier division.
Tournament organizer Allan Borres Delantar, who has run events without a formal rating system in place, said the lack of a database made it difficult to settle disputes over player classification:
"Daghan kaayo ug reklamo based sa among previous tournaments kay wala tay formal rankings".
Translation: There have been plenty of complaints among previous tournaments because of the lack of formal rankings
Having a structured ranking system in place has already made a noticeable difference in how smoothly tournaments run.
More Than Just Ratings
The platform also handles tournament logistics, including online registration, bracketing, payment processing, live scoring updates, and court booking. For organizers juggling spreadsheets and group chats to run a single event, that kind of bundled toolset covers a real operational gap.
The platform has already been used in tournaments including the Blazing Torch and True Edge Cup. PickleRank PH has also partnered with Bola Pickleball PH to help officiate matches and validate player rankings. This adds a layer of oversight to keep the system credible as more organizers adopt it.
Participation remains voluntary for PickleRank PH. Players can join through the individual rating system, the tournament-specific rankings, or both.
Why This Matters For Cebu
Ranking disputes are not unique to Cebu. PickleRank PH offers a case study in what a homegrown solution can look like when a community decides to build its own infrastructure.
Whether the model gets adopted more broadly across the Philippines and the wider Southeast Asian pickleball scene will likely depend on how well it scales past the tournaments where it's already been tested. For now, it gives Cebu something the city didn't have before, a shared standard that players and organizers can actually point to.
If you're building your own competitive game and want a coach who can help you climb whatever rating system you're playing under, The Picklebase's coaching directory is a good place to start. And for more updates on how the ranking landscape is evolving across the region, follow us on Instagram @thepicklebase.