Fiend at Court Unplugged
The USTA Strategic Initiatives unveiled in 2020 includes the imperative of providing positive experiences to new players who are experiencing tennis for the first time. As a sport with a steep learning curve, it is essential to get new players engaged with quality information and instruction on how to play the sport. It shouldn’t be hard for a player new to tennis to discover opportunities to engage with professional instruction, but it is. Tennis needs to rethink how it presents itself in the modern era.
I have been performing google searches for “beginning tennis lessons near me” from spoofed and anonymized locations using a VPN and an incognito browser. The results are discouraging. First of all, official USTA and USPTA pages do not come up on the first page of search results… ever. PlayYourCourt.com, through obviously paid advertising, is consistently at the top of every query. PlayYourCourt essentially provides an online matchmaking service between players and instructors. They aren’t associated with courts or a facility.
I don’t think that there is anything wrong with PlayYourCourt. I am mildly uncomfortable with the fact that they don’t seem to actually vet any of their instructors beyond customer reviews and ratings. The fact that a third party service like PlayYourCourt exists at all is an indictment of the USTA and the USPTA. Those organizations left a void in this area for PlayYourCourt to step into.
While there is a lot of variation, for the most part tennis facilities and clubs have terrible public web pages. Some public facilities don’t have a web page at all. When the facility is run by a municipal Parks and Rec department, the tennis offerings are likely to be listed in an activities catalog that is hard to locate and find. It is also not uncommon to find a nice summary of classes on existing websites… from 2019 or earlier. Zombie web pages for tennis facilities are a chronic issue.
When searching for beginning tennis lessons I am struck by the number of facilities that don’t seem to offer group instruction at all. Sometimes, beginning lessons are available, but finding it requires navigating 4-5 pages deep into the site. I am left wondering how any new players ever manage to engage with the sport at all. It’s depressing.
I can hear facility operators muttering that really all people have to do is pick up the phone and ask. To that I scream “WHAT YEAR IS THIS?!?!” Do we expect people to look up the phone numbers for facilities in the yellow pages? Additionally, do we really trust the kid manning the desk in the pro shop who just had their TikTok scrolling interrupted to deliver accurate and complete information? That is putting a lot of faith in a high school kid drawing minimum wage.
All tennis facilities should have a professional and accurate web page that describes the various product offerings. The tennis consumer shouldn’t have to pick up the phone to find out if there is a level appropriate class available to them. Additionally there should be a prominent widget on the main page of every facility labeled “Get Started in Tennis” that takes prospective new players to information about ongoing beginning tennis instruction.
As a tennis industry, we shouldn’t be making prospective players dig around to find playing opportunities and instruction for new players. You know why? Because if a consumer does the same search for pickleball instead of tennis… a wealth of appropriate options are presented. There is no reason why tennis should be so bad at internet engagement.
