An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
I played a tournament last October at the Mission Hills Country Club. The COVID postponed BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells was going on at the same time. One morning WTA player Desirae Krawczyk and her doubles partner Alexa Guarachi strolled into the club for a practice session. Naturally, I watched their workout with rapt attention. They played the classic doubles practice game “Dingles!” against their coaches.
Malcolm Gladwell penned a powerful essay praising the WTA response to the Peng Shuai crisis, ESPN drops the ball on a significant match at the Australian Open, and other stories from the margins of the tennis world.
Tennis on Campus was started by the USTA in 2000 as a way to capture the thousands of former Junior tennis players who had moved onto college, but not onto one of the limited spots on their collegiate tennis team. The program is managed by the USTA in cooperation with the National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association. It was supposed to be an important mechanism to bridge former Junior players into Adult tennis.
For years the USTA has obsessed about low participation of players between 20-40 years old. There is a “bathtub” shaped curve as participation plummets when players age out of Juniors tennis. The numbers don’t recover until after people turn 40. From a marketing perspective, it is a disaster because that demographic is where disposable income lives. It is also bad for overall participation because many people don’t ever return to the tennis ecosystem.
At the Cotton Bowl tournament over the holidays, I had an interesting conversation with someone who is a “near sider” to the USTA organization. That person dropped this truth bomb on me: The USTA thinks that the lack of participation in the 20-40 year old demographic is because younger players don’t want to play with older players. That’s right Seniors… the USTA is blaming you for the historic lack of participation in the younger demographic.
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John Newcombe is a striking figure from the golden era of Australian tennis. The Aussies were also well known for on court achievement and even better known for having a great time off the court. It was an era of sportsmanship and camaraderie that may never exist again. Newcombe’s autobiography, Newk: Life On and Off the Court was published in 2002, but still feels current and relevant to this day.
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The 2022 edition of the Friend at Court has been published by the USTA. There were no changes to the Rules of Tennis as published by the ITF. The USTA made minor changes to scheduling guidelines and the minimum rest between matches.
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Tennis players don’t spend enough time training for mid-court play. It is a profound truth expressed by Tom Gullikson last November in the “Compete Like a Champion” podcast interview. Tennis coaching and training focuses almost exclusively on play from one of two primary areas, the baseline or the net. My junior tennis days were punctuated by loud exhortations to avoid “no-man’s land” at all cost.
Chris Evert announces a cancer diagnosis and Netflix is filming a documentary series with behind-the-scenes look at life on the ATP and WTA tours. Australia makes a final decision on the immigration status of Novak Djokovic who continues to be one of the most divisive figures in tennis. Australian Open play is underway!
ONE thing you can learn from the USTA official landing page for the Adult tournament structure is that ONE is a very important concept. That page touts that there is ONE nationwide structure of tournaments. ONE nationwide points-per-round ranking system. ONE standings list. That very same page later pivots sharply into a series of statements that describe areas where USTA Sections have latitude to make decisions to “best meet the needs of their adult players.” Unfortunately, the early implementation of those decisions has revealed that a little more rigor is needed in order to preserve the integrity required to truly have ONE working system.