This weekend, I’ve been examining Craig Tiley’s record with senior competitive tennis during his tenure at Tennis Australia. What began as an effort to understand his priorities as the incoming CEO of the USTA led me into the history of Tennis Seniors Australia and an unsuccessful 2019 proposal to bring that organization’s national operations under Tennis Australia’s umbrella.
This exercise has left me (somewhat) reassured. Tiley’s Tennis Australia was sufficiently interested in senior competition to propose assuming responsibility for its national administration, complete with dedicated staff and an advisory group. That doesn’t guarantee anything about how he will approach senior tennis in the United States, but it gives me reason to believe the subject is at least on his radar.
Today, I want to bring this weekend’s discussion back to American tennis and explain why I think senior competitive tennis deserves considerably more attention than it has recently received from the USTA.
Traditional age-group tournament tennis is one of the most undervalued assets in the American competitive tennis ecosystem. It provides a pathway for players to remain serious competitors throughout their lives, with opportunities to pursue improvement and compete against their peers well into their seventies, eighties, and beyond. Few sports offer anything comparable.
That opportunity has enormous value for player retention. Tournament competitors have reasons to continue training, maintaining their fitness, traveling, and investing in their tennis development. They also become tournament directors, officials, volunteers, mentors, and advocates. Many have been contributing to the sport for decades, and their involvement extends far beyond the matches they play.
Yet the USTA’s institutional priorities have increasingly favored other adult competitive products, particularly League and NTRP tournaments. Those programs have considerable merit, and I participate in both. However, the organization has devoted substantial resources to expanding and promoting them while traditional age-group tournaments have received comparatively little attention.
The consequences are becoming difficult to ignore. Senior tournament draws are shrinking, sometimes to the point where players question whether traveling to compete is worthwhile. League occupies an enormous portion of the competitive calendar, and the proliferation of NTRP tournament divisions has further fragmented the available player population. There are only so many weekends in a year, and only so many players willing to commit them to competition.
I suspect part of the problem is how organizational success is measured. League participation and new competitive offerings generate numbers that are easy to incorporate into growth objectives. Maintaining a healthy population of established age-group competitors will never produce the same immediate increase in participation statistics, even though it contributes substantially to keeping people involved in tennis over their lifetimes.
From my perspective, the USTA is systemically undervaluing the role of senior age-group tournaments in the broader competitive ecosystem. These events will never attract the participation numbers that League does, but they serve players with competitive needs that League cannot meet.
Some players are simply too good for the available competition, while others have aged out of their expected NTRP performance level when measured against the 18+ divisions. Age-group tournaments provide an important outlet for players to continue pursuing meaningful competition when League no longer offers appropriate competitive play.
There is something fundamentally contradictory about an organization that encourages players to improve their skills and remain involved in tennis for a lifetime, yet seems to lose interest in serving them when they succeed at those combined objectives. Become too good, and competitive opportunities fall off a cliff. Keep playing long enough, and find yourself in the same situation. These are precisely the outcomes the USTA should want to encourage, yet the players who achieve them can find themselves increasingly marginalized by the very system that helped them get there.
The National Women’s Tennis Organization (NWTO) and the National Senior Men’s Tennis Association (NSMTA) exist to advocate for senior competitive players. I am currently serving my second term on the NWTO board, and I have considerable appreciation for the knowledge and commitment these organizations bring to the sport.
However, neither organization controls the tournament structure or the resources needed to sustain it. Those decisions rest with the USTA, where the people appointed to the national adult competitive committees do not always have substantial firsthand experience with tournament competition.
I worry that the USTA’s leadership development and committee appointment processes tend to recognize administrative experience gained through programs like League more readily than decades of experience with age-group tournaments. Both perspectives are valuable, but tournament players and administrators have knowledge of the competitive environment that cannot be acquired simply by reviewing participation reports.
Independent advocacy organizations like the NWTO and NSMTA can identify emerging problems, explain the practical consequences of organizational decisions, and represent players whose concerns might otherwise receive little attention. Their effectiveness, however, depends on whether USTA leadership is willing to listen and act.
Representatives of NWTO and NSMTA recently met with USTA Adult Tennis leadership and came away with assurances that the USTA plans to do more to market senior tennis. I was glad to hear that, although I think the problems go considerably deeper than a lack of promotion. The USTA needs to take a systemic look at what its various adult competitive programs are doing to one another. League schedules consume much of the calendar, NTRP tournaments compete for many of the same players, and traditional age-group tournaments are left struggling to assemble viable draws. More advertising might help, but I doubt it will accomplish much without addressing those underlying conditions.
One of Craig Tiley’s five objectives for American tennis is to have the most events per capita. It isn’t exactly clear what demographic group those events will target. Even if that goal includes senior tennis, it still concerns me given the current adult competition environment. The problem isn’t that there aren’t enough tournaments, but that not enough people are entering them. Adding more opportunities sounds wonderful, but we also need to examine the systemic factors contributing to low participation.
I’d like to see more attention paid to who participates in the decisions that affect these programs. Experienced age-group tournament players understand the practical consequences of shrinking draws, conflicting schedules, and changes to tournament infrastructure and incentives. The NWTO and NSMTA have spent years advocating for those players, and there is considerable expertise within both organizations. That experience should carry weight when the USTA establishes priorities and decides where to invest its resources.
What I learned about Tennis Australia this weekend gives me some encouragement. The 2019 proposal to assume TSA’s national operations included dedicated staff and an advisory group for senior tennis. Whatever the merits of that particular arrangement, it suggests that Tiley’s organization recognized senior competition as something deserving specific attention. Hopefully that wasn’t just a ploy to convince the TSA that senior tennis wouldn’t be neglected should that consolidation have occurred.
Traditional age-group tournaments have been part of American tennis for generations, and they provide competitive opportunities that other forms of competition cannot offer. I hope the USTA’s new leadership recognizes what it would mean to lose it, and takes an active interest in making sure that doesn’t happen.
