An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
Yesterday I wrote about the results of an internet search for “learn to play tennis.” I intentionally did not mention the first paid advertisement that came up as a result of that query. The ad I was served was for the PlayYourCourt tennis community. This is a perfect segue to return to the topic of TennisLink.
As an interesting thought exercise, I set up two web browsers side by side and pointed them at google. For the sake of technical completeness, I did this from a newly initialized virtual machine from a browser with no search history and ran the session through a VPN to ensure that the search could not be associated with my previous internet activity in any way. From this pristine state, I constructed a pair of queries: “learn to play tennis” and “learn to play pickleball.”
Today we are transitioning over to the side of my tennis consumer analysis that addresses the people who are engaged in tennis. Further segmentation within that market are people who are engaged in tennis in a non-playing capacity and people who play tennis. I drew a Venn diagram of these two segments acknowledging that there is some degree of overlap between those two groups.
I am delivering on the promise I made yesterday to spend the rest of the weekend examining what a comprehensive consumer analysis for tennis entails. The image that accompanies this post is my literal first draft of that effort. First, let’s revisit the statement that sent me down this path.
One of the most interesting aspects of the “2021 Adult Tournament Changes” published by the USTA is the claim that the new structure would make it easier to market tennis to the consumer. If this means that the USTA is actually about to start marketing tennis tournaments, this is super exciting news. As I previously observed in “Donald Dell Fires Shots Across the USTA Bow,” I cannot recall seeing an advertisement for playing tennis outside of a tennis context. Ever.
I was recently thumbing through the USTA Yearbook from 1980 and happened on an advertisement for “USTA Publications.” It is a relic from that forgotten era before the internet and amazon.com brought us the gratuitous ability to order books online and download digital books on demand.
I finally catch a break in my slog through the “Correcting Errors” section of the ITF Rules of Tennis as published in the USTA Friend at Court. I have been struggling through horror after horror in this section. In previous weeks we have discussed errors that I am quite frankly challenged to understand how they could occur. Additionally, some of the recent corrections don’t always seem to be equitable to me. Today’s rules are a welcome respite.
When I played junior tennis there were two ways to enter a tennis tournament. One was to visit the host facility of the event to register and pay the entry fee. The other was to fill out a physical entry form and mail it into the host organization with a check. This is the point in the story where the umpire I gave birth to usually interjects to ask about the stone tablet postage rates for those entry forms.
This week’s episode of the TENNIS.com Podcast carried an interview with WTA player Julia Elbaba. During the opening of the episode, there was discussion between Elbaba and the podcast hosts on coping with the recent permanent closure of the USTA Player Development Center in New York. It was news to me to learn that there even was such a program at that location.
One of my favorite sayings is “When all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.” When thinking about how to retain junior players as they transition into adult tennis, tournaments are like the USTA’s hammer while leagues are the USTA’s wrench. Both are valuable tools, unless confronted with a screw.