The Opportunity Cliff: A Competitive Tennis Crisis
The USTA quietly unveiled a new mission statement earlier this year. Since that time, it has been steadily weaving its way more and more intoRead More
An Ode to Slab Courts
Yesterday I lamented how my hometown systematically blocks public access to tennis courts that are ordinarily open in other municipalities. After being thwarted by the locks and chains at the middle school courts last weekend, I swung by a couple of courts that I knew would be available. As far as I know, Belair Park has the only courts in Wichita Falls that are routinely open and accessible. In fact, there are no gates at all so they can’t be closed and locked.
Learning Curves: Pickleball vs Tennis
Examination of pickleball is unavoidable and inevitable in any serious consideration in growing the game of tennis. Pickleball is regarded as a competitive threat to tennis. At the same time, the explosive growth of the sport is an enticing case study for any sport wishing to replicate the same success.
Coming Full Circle with Senior Tennis
Someday I will tell the story of when I quit tennis forever. Today I want to focus on a tiny part of the story of when I came back to tennis. Specifically, how I slid down the slippery slope into the NTRP system. As previously mentioned in “My Days as an NTRP Sandbagging Bastard” I never had any desire to play NTRP rated tennis.
Learn To Play: Tennis vs Pickleball
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.”
Marketing Tennis Tournaments: Consumer Analysis Part 2
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.
Marketing Tennis Tournaments: Consumer Analysis
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.
Marketing Tennis Tournaments: Putting Pen to Paper
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.
A Deeper Cut: USTA Restructuring and Player Development
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.
Radical Ideas for Bridging Juniors to Adult Tennis
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.