Tennis News You Can Use
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.”
Pivoting off this weekend’s consumer market segmentation analysis, I was wondering what experience a person expressing a sudden desire to play tennis would have on the internet. In fact, I think that these google queries are a pretty accurate simulation of how a new prospective tennis consumer would approach the situation.
First the tennis. No USTA site or asset was returned on the first page of my search results. The sites returned included obscure blogs (I know, pot, kettle, black) and companies that sell online tennis instruction. Also included was a private tennis club that at one point published an article about how to start playing tennis later in life. Other results from the first page included, a New York Times book review of “Late to the Game” and a wikihow article on tennis.
To reach a USTA web page from that query, I would have to click on the “next page” of query results and then scroll down 5 sites to reach the first USTA asset. That bring me to a web page titled “Play Tennis.” My own experience and market analysis suggests that most consumers will never reach the second page of that google query.
For pickleball, the story is completely different. The very first link returned is for “Learning to Play” published by USA Pickleball. That organization is the national governing body for the sport of pickleball in the US. They provide the official rules, tournaments, rankings, and promotional materials. In other words, USA Pickleball is what the USTA is to tennis.
The “Learning to Play” pickleball page is organized in three blocks. The first of these is “Part I: The Basics.” Clicking through on that block takes the reader to a summary of the basics of pickleball. This includes the rules, scoring, and how to execute various shots. In short, it is a page that provides instruction on how to play the sport.
It is a completely different story for tennis. For the consumer that actually manages to land on the USTA “Get out and Play” page, there are four basic sections. To reach any content on that page, the user has to first scroll down past an oversized picture of a person playing tennis.
The first section of information is a “Get in the Game” advertisement of the benefits of playing tennis. There are no links from that initial section. The second segment is “Youth Tennis” with links to Team Tennis, School Tennis, and Tournaments. Following that is “College Tennis” with various ways to engage in tennis while in college. Following that is “Adult Tennis.”
The “Adult Tennis” section contains links to USTA League, USTA Tournaments, Social Play, and Wheelchair tennis. You know what is missing from that page? There is no information on how to actually play tennis. Pretty much all of the information on the USTA “Play Tennis” web page presupposes that the reader already knows how to play tennis.
It is clear that pickleball is surging in popularity at the same time that popular interest in tennis is waning. From the outside looking in, it appears that the USTA is focusing very specifically on some of the characteristics of pickleball to inform Adult tournament structure coming in 2021. That is all well and good because it is clear that the USTA is losing prospective racquet sports consumers to pickleball.
At the same time, the USTA needs to take a broad perspective on how the organization is engaging perspective consumers who have expressed an interest in learning to play tennis. These are the consumers who are currently outside of tennis looking for a way to engage. As a collective tennis community we need to ensure that they find what they are looking for.
Here is a crazy idea. Perhaps we should actually teach them something about playing tennis to start that engagement.
- “Play Tennis,” https://www.usta.com/en/home/play.html, viewed 8/7/2020.
- “Learning to Play,” https://usapickleball.org/what-is-pickleball/learning-to-play/, viewed 8/7/2020.
- “About USA Pickeball,” https://usapickleball.org/about-us/, viewed 8/7/2020.
- 2021 Adult Tournament Changes, USTA National Webinar, undated.
- USTA Adult Tournament Changes for 2021, USTA National Website, viewed 7/25/2020
