For the most part, the professional tennis tour calendars take a hiatus at this time of the year. The only events scheduled this week are WTA 125 events, which are typically not broadcast unless some major star somehow winds up in the draw. It’s the season when the Tennis Channel usually phones it in by airing random matches from the previous year. Unfortunately, this week the network has elected to fill much of the space with live Pickleball coverage.
With a little creativity and a lot of marketing, the Tennis Channel could turn this professional tour downtime into an event. Something similar to the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week.” While it undoubtedly doesn’t cost much to rebroadcast stale matches, I suspect that viewership is dismal. It’s a lost opportunity.
Even simply reorganizing the previous year’s matches into themes with a cohesive narrative could be more effective at drawing viewership. This could even feature matches of the big-name players that the Tennis Channel banks on during this time of the year. For example, one day could feature the “Top 3” matches played by Novak Djokovic. Another idea that would draw viewers would be a day focusing on the rise of Jannick Sinner.
Due to the length of matches, it wouldn’t be enough to rebroadcast them without slight modification. Otherwise, people flipping channels wouldn’t see anything other than a random match. However, a small graphic in the top corner where the Tennis Channel logo resides would be sufficient. Have a graphic artist work up a “Top #3” logo and underline it with the name of the player who is being featured that day.
I would also love to see iconic matches replayed with a twist. One idea would involve the two players watching it together and commenting on what was occurring at various junctures. An alternative to this would be having other personalities discussing the match as it unfolded. This could work similar to the Manning brothers alternate Monday Night Football feed or Mystery Science Theater. It’s a way to freshen up matches that were played in the past.
This would also take some marketing. Due to the late-breaking impact of the current tournament’s “Order of Play” on the broadcast schedule, marketing upcoming content is a muscle that the Tennis Channel has allowed to atrophy. Viewers have learned to fend for themselves to find out when the matches they want to watch are being played. This is a rare opportunity for the Tennis Channel to publish an advance schedule of which content will be featured each day to let fans mark their calendars.
My recent ongoing odyssey through the training techniques that made cameo appearances in the Netflix Series “Break Point” has convinced me that the network is sitting on a ton of material that could be repackaged into a tennis-centric fitness week. I genuinely miss the tennis instructional content that the Tennis Channel used to air.
Thinking even further out of the box, there are a plethora of tennis centric reality show ideas that would probably do well. I would love a tennis skills competition where normal people try to do things like returning Serena Williams’s serve. The WTA published a cookbook for charity in the early days of the Covid shutdown. I would love to see a cooking show where the players that contributed the recipes demonstrated how to make them while talking about various tennis topics.
Of course each of these ideas would take some level of investment, but that could turn into a catalyst that entices new viewers to the sport. These ideas could also generate a lot of interesting content for social media which would serve the same purpose. Done right, it could result in higher viewership for the standard live tennis content at the network.
Anything is better than wasting the available airtime during the brief tennis “off season.” Rebroadcasting random matches without explanation or running Pickleball events is simply not trying. Tennis deserves better.
