Does Inbox Overload Threaten Tennis?

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. At first glance, one presentation I sat in on titled “Use and Abuse of Personal Information – Politics Edition” by Alan Michaels and Jared Byers has nothing to do with tennis. It was a breakdown of analysis performed by a research team on how political candidates used, and in some cases misused, personal information during the last national election cycle. While much of that presentation was completely irrelevant to tennis, one detail they shared sparked me to wonder about the efficacy of email as a mass communication mechanism for tennis in this modern era.

The researchers created thousands of fake identities, each used to sign up for campaign updates from exactly one political candidate. That way, they could track whether the information they provided was later shared or leaked by assessing any additional messages they received. From a privacy standpoint, the results were striking. As it turns out, politicians either don’t care or aren’t adept at protecting personal information. That is hardly surprising.

What stopped me cold was the researcher’s calculation that signing up for communication from a candidate results in email traffic that will take anywhere from 10 to 100 hours of reading time on an annual basis. Doing the math on the upper limit of that range reveals that some candidates sent out material that would take the average reader almost two hours to completely consume each week. That is a pretty big ask, raises the question of whether the majority of political emails are being read at all.

For most of the population, the answer is probably no. There is no way for many people to read all the messages they receive. So while that medium is arguably no longer an effective communication mechanism, it is practically free to send, and in a tight race, every vote counts. That might explain the buckshot approach taken by some candidates. However, that volume of communication raises an uncomfortable question: how effective can messaging be when no reasonable person has the capacity to keep up?

For me, the tennis relevance is that the USTA, at every level, heavily leverages email when communicating with its members. Things like tournament schedules, league registration reminders, and marketing all arrive in our email inboxes. It isn’t terribly uncommon for players to miss important messages from the USTA, such as notification of suspension points or information about upcoming tournaments. I strongly suspect that most tennis players delete most of the emails they receive from the organization without ever reading them. As an example, I have played for more than one captain who confessed to not reading the captain’s letter sent before USTA League playoffs and Sectionals. (That blows me away.)

If most people aren’t reading emails from the USTA, this presents a real conundrum for rolling out new models of competition or running evaluations of new delivery mechanisms. How can a new format be fairly evaluated if players don’t even know about it? If innovative new formats are attempted, the volume of information must necessarily rise, which increases the cognitive reading load on prospective players. The communications hurdle is significant.

I should note that I have enough self-awareness to realize that most people do not read my blog every day, with the exception of a handful of people who are related to me by blood or marriage. In fact, I may be putting a higher volume of words into my email subscribers’ inboxes than the USTA does in any given week. I will be self-evaluating that over the next few weeks.

As another interesting aside from the Black Hat conference presentation, the researchers discovered that political candidates don’t think their constituents care at all about cybersecurity. While that is hardly surprising, UFOs came up more frequently than the subject of my life’s work. UFOs. I feel like that is a sad commentary on society.

For today, as we are confronted with the inescapable reality that some change is needed to support and preserve tournament tennis, the challenge goes beyond designing alternative models of competition. The most daunting problem may be figuring out how to effectively communicate new opportunities to the playing community. Tournament announcements will compete with League reminders, which will compete with US Open promotions, which will compete with everything else already flooding inboxes.

The biggest threat to evolving tennis might be inbox overload.