Most amateur tennis players I know spend roughly equal time playing and trying to find someone to play. The forehand isn't the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the friction stack: someone at your level, free at the same time, near a court that's not booked solid by a coaching session. FTP's tennis layer attacks that stack directly.
Singles and doubles aren't the same rating
A 4.0 NTRP-equivalent player who's been playing weekly singles for ten years is often a much weaker doubles player, and vice versa. Court positioning, net play, return placement — different skills. FTP stores singles and doubles ratings separately on your card; the engine learns from your match results what kind of player you actually are. If you've only played singles for the last six months, your doubles number stays a soft estimate until you put doubles matches into it.
That separation matters when you're matchmaking. Posting "looking for a hitting partner around 4.0" without specifying format gets you mismatches half the time. The filters on open games split by format so you can be honest about what you're after.
Finding hitting partners and ladders
The simplest path: post that you're looking for a partner at your level for a regular weekly slot. Two or three responses, you trial each for a session, you keep the one whose game complements yours. The whole flow takes a fortnight.
Local ladders work differently. A ladder is a ranked list of players in your area; you challenge someone within striking distance, win and you move up. FTP runs ladders inside city clusters where there's enough density — Lisbon and Madrid have active ones, Porto and Barcelona are spinning up. Your ladder rank becomes another input into your overall rating: ladders are competitive matches, so the engine weights them slightly more than friendly hits.
Public courts vs private clubs
In Iberia, the public-court game and the private-club game look almost like different sports. Public courts are free, sometimes lit, often hard surface, sometimes a queue on Sunday morning. Private clubs are red clay, professional reservation systems, sometimes a coach hovering. Both sit on the facilities map, and both feed the same rating system — what matters to your card is the match itself, not the venue's price tag.
A note on Brazil: hard courts dominate, but the clay is starting to spread again, especially in São Paulo. Same logic applies — book the court, log the match, the card learns.
Ready? Generate your tennis card and post a hitting-partner request — the first three weeks of consistent play are enough to get a rating you can trust.