Yesterday, I introduced the idea of developing a Concept of Operations (ConOps) for Adult Tennis. Today, I want to think about what that document might include. Adult tennis has quite a few moving parts, and deciding what belongs within the scope of our operational picture is an interesting exercise in its own right.
In systems engineering, one of the first decisions we make is where to draw the boundaries around the system we’re examining. There is some judgment involved in deciding where those lines belong, but we have to draw them somewhere, or the analysis can quickly get out of hand. For this hypothetical ConOps, I’m going to limit the scope to adults participating in tennis, from someone picking up a racquet for the first time to an experienced competitor playing in an international championship.
That decision leaves the organizations and resources responsible for delivering tennis on the other side of the boundary. Teaching professionals, clubs, facilities, tournament directors, League coordinators, and the USTA itself become interfaces to our defined system. Their contributions are essential, and we certainly need to understand how players interact with them. However, those details are important to tennis delivery, but they aren’t necessary to understand the experience we’re trying to provide to adult players.
A more direct way to say that is that a separate ConOps is arguably needed for the delivery side of tennis. The ConOps we are considering this weekend allows us to specifically focus on adult engagement with the sport.
Attempting to catalog every variation of Adult tennis experience quickly becomes an exercise in futility. (I know because I briefly started down that path.) Fortunately, we don’t need that level of detail. At a high level, I think we can organize most adult tennis activities into six broad categories: Discovery, Socialization, Development, Fitness, Competition, and Entertainment.
Discovery captures the opportunities that introduce people to tennis. Socialization includes the recreational and connective activities that build relationships. Development covers the process of improvement, including instruction, clinics, drills, and other opportunities to improve. Fitness recognizes that some people are primarily interested in the health benefits that the physical activity of tennis provides. Competition is how we measure improvement, from local ladders and League Play to NTRP and age-group tournaments. Entertainment includes travel, destination events, and other opportunities where tennis is part of a larger experience.
There is plenty of overlap, and I wouldn’t spend much time arguing about which category a particular activity belongs in. The categories are simply a way to organize our thinking. What interests me much more is the purpose each activity serves.
Every one of these engagement mechanisms exists because it fulfills some want or need within the tennis community. At least, that ought to be the case. Someone who joins a recreational doubles group may be looking for exercise, companionship, and a regular opportunity to play. Someone entering an age-group tournament may be interested in testing their abilities against players of a similar age, perhaps with national rankings at stake. A League player may value the team environment as much as the competition itself.
League and tournaments both provide organized competition, but that doesn’t make them interchangeable. A player who enjoys the camaraderie of a League team may have little interest in competing individually in tournaments. Conversely, someone interested in testing themselves against the best players in their age group may find that League doesn’t satisfy that particular ambition. The two mechanisms serve overlapping audiences, but they don’t necessarily serve the same purposes.
A ConOps provides an opportunity to systematically examine those relationships. What needs are players trying to satisfy? Which activities address those needs? How well do the available opportunities accomplish their intended purposes? Are there gaps where players have needs that aren’t being met? And are there activities that are squeezing out another that is leaving an unmet need in the broader community?
I suspect we would learn quite a bit simply by working through those questions.
Another complication is that players rarely fit neatly into a single category. I play League, compete in tournaments, practice independently, take advantage of training opportunities, and enjoy recreational tennis. Each serves a different purpose in my tennis life. If any of them were no longer an option, my tennis happiness would diminish.
Individual and organizational preferences and needs will also change over time. A tennis life can last for decades, and there is no reason to expect the same engagement mechanisms to satisfy a player throughout that entire period or for organizational engagement mechanisms to remain completely static over long timeframes.
Understanding those factors is important when we begin considering how the various activities interact.
Imagine a successful introductory program that attracts a substantial number of new players. From the perspective of the people administering that program, everything may be going wonderfully. But what happens when those players want to continue? If they can’t find affordable courts, appropriate instruction, or other people to play with, the initial success may have little lasting value. The problem isn’t necessarily with the introductory program. It may be with something entirely outside the control of the people responsible for delivering it.
We see similar relationships among established competitive programs. League, NTRP tournaments, and age-group events can all draw from overlapping populations of players. They also compete for court availability and space on the calendar. Adding a second non-advancing League season may be an excellent decision when considered solely from the perspective of League participation. Whether it is equally beneficial to the overall adult tennis ecosystem is a different question.
This is one of the reasons I believe understanding the purpose of each engagement mechanism is vitally important. Before making any changes to any program, we ought to understand what its participants value about it and how the proposed changes might affect other opportunities. A decision that improves one participation metric could have unintended consequences elsewhere.
As a real complicating factor, the USTA doesn’t control every part of this ecosystem. Clubs, municipalities, independent organizations, teaching professionals, and individual players provide an enormous amount of adult tennis activity. That doesn’t make their contributions any less relevant to the operational big picture. If anything, it makes understanding the interfaces and dependencies more important.
I’m also not suggesting that a ConOps should prescribe how every tennis program must operate. Its value would come from establishing a shared understanding of the player needs being served, the mechanisms available to satisfy them, and the relationships among those mechanisms. That gives the people making program decisions a common frame of reference, even when their responsibilities are limited to one particular part of the system.
Developing that understanding would probably reveal some uncomfortable truths. We might discover that certain player needs receive disproportionate attention, that other needs are poorly served, or that some initiatives are working against one another. We might also find that programs considered successful by their individual administrators aren’t contributing as much to lifelong tennis participation as everyone assumes.
Those are exactly the kinds of things I would want to know before deciding where to invest resources or how to change an existing program.
Tomorrow, I want to turn my attention to the organizational side of this discussion. The USTA has people and committees responsible for different aspects of adult tennis, and there are good reasons for that specialization. But if we’re going to think about adult tennis as an interconnected system, we also need to consider how decisions made within those individual communities affect everyone else.
