Location, Location, Location: New Tennis Participants

Fiend at Court Unplugged

The Tennis Industry Forum is an annual meeting that publicly shares information from the Tennis Industry Association, the USTA, the National Golf Foundation (!), and Tennis Industry United. The target audience includes tennis service providers and tennis equipment manufacturers. The data disclosed at that meeting is positioned as key industry research that can help a tennis business grow. The 2021 presentations included location details on where new tennis players are engaging with the sport. That data illustrates the fundamental challenge the USTA has with retaining those new players in the tennis ecosystem.

*Chart presented at the 2021 Tennis Industry Forum [1]*

The vast majority of new tennis players are picking up the sport at public parks and courts at co-located at schools. The challenge the tennis industry has with those new players is that most parks and schools do not have a mechanism to engage and retain them. The best case scenario at those venues is when a tennis teaching professional or tennis advocate has hung out a shingle offering tennis lessons or public drills.

As an editorial note, I am not sure exactly where public tennis centers fall within the data collected. I define a Tennis Center as a collection of courts (usually) built with public funds including a pro-shop. Generally those courts are not left open outside of defined operating hours and and a nominal court fee is usually charged. I can’t see people consistently checking the public park or school/college on the survey for a tennis center. It is an odd category omission in the survey structure.

The USTA created the “Tennis Champions” initiative to engage tennis enthusiasts to promote tennis in their local area. I have been describing my efforts to meet each monthly promotional challenge in this blog. From my first hand experience with the “Tennis Champions” program, it is focused on bringing new players to the sport. It is an extremely positive move by the USTA to spark a grassroots effort to bring new players into the fold.

There has been a discernable uptick in tennis participation at my local park. As reflected by the photo below, it is not uncommon for all the courts to be fully used on weekend mornings.

The logical next step for the USTA is to design a program to hook these casual tennis players into a longer term relationship with the sport. Some sort of “tennis ambassador” program for unstaffed local courts would seem to be the obvious extension.