An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
Television viewership for the recently concluded US Open tennis tournament was down sharply when compared to 2019. A lot of the decline in viewership can be chalked up to the COVID-19 sports bubbles that created a glut of major sporting events taking place at the same time. The overall average tournament viewership was down 45% compared to 2019.
A couple of weeks ago the USTA sent an email addressed to all league and tournament players announcing that there will be no NTRP ratings updates published at the end of 2020. I believe that the majority of the regular readers of this site compete in adult tournaments or leagues, thus also received the email. Consequently, I am assuming that most are already aware that the “bump” will not occur this year.
On the day of opening play in the US Open this year, the USTA announced a plan to use the tournament as a platform to promote awareness of key initiatives to promote and develop the growth of tennis in the United States. In addition to raising the visibility and awareness of social issues, “Rally to Rebuild,” “Net Generation,” and “Tennis Industry United,” were featured.
It is hard for me to imagine that this news would have escaped the narrow niche of tennis enthusiasts who follow this site, but just in case, there was a fairly significant story line that emerged from the US Open last week. Novak Djokovic was disqualified from the tournament after hitting a ball in anger that injured a court official.
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The USTA has announced a fairly significant restructuring of the membership cost model. This initiative is a recommendation from the “Membership Transition Advisory Group” which studied “best-in-class” membership models to develop a new engagement structure for tennis.
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There were two Adult Major Zone Tennis Tournaments in Texas over the last weekend. One was the Polo Tennis Club Adult Major Zone which was located in Austin. The other was the Texas Tennis Museum & Hall of Fame Adult Doubles Major Zone in Waco. It is weird to have two Adult Major Zone tournaments scheduled on top of each other.
Over the weekend, the USTA sent out a letter to players who were slated to play in the individual NTRP National Championships in 2020. It was a follow up to a survey sent out to players shortly after the original event in April was cancelled. The survey was sent to explore the possibility that the NTRP Championships would be rescheduled for October of this year. This new communication makes it clear that there will be no tournament in 2020.
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.”
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.
I was recently appointed to a team working on a corporate initiative to improve the culture of innovation at my place of employment. Consequently the synaptic connections in my brain were already primed with research, thoughts, and data on innovation long before news of the new 2021 USTA Adult Tournament Structure started hitting my inbox.
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