Every Wednesday, this site examines a rule or governing principle that shapes how tennis is actually played. We are currently working sequentially through The Code in the USTA’s Friend at Court, occasionally comparing the current language with the 2001 edition. This week brings us to Principle 16 and a group of people who, according to The Code, have absolutely no role in the match.
Spectators never make calls. A player must not enlist the aid of a spectator in making a call. No spectator has a part in a match.
USTA Friend at Court 2026, The Code, Principle 16
This is another relatively uncomplicated principle. Players cannot ask spectators for help making calls. Spectators cannot volunteer that help. It does not matter whether the spectator had a better view, knows the rules, or happens to be absolutely certain about what they saw. They are spectators.
Several years ago, I attempted to violate this principle. I was playing a match against a woman who was seemingly unhappy with one of my baseline calls. Her husband was sitting nearby and had an excellent view of the line. He was also an experienced tennis player whose opinion I respected. The match was convivial, and I had no interest in keeping a point if I had actually missed the call, so I asked him whether he would have overruled me if he had been officiating the match.
He wisely declined to render an opinion. At the time, that seemed like a perfectly reasonable way to resolve the situation. I trusted his judgment and would have changed my call if he told me that I had missed it. None of that matters under Principle 16. He was not officiating the match. He was a spectator, and I was not entitled to recruit him as an unofficial line judge simply because he happened to have a good view and I considered him credible. His refusal to participate was the correct response. I was the one who was out of line.
The prohibition makes sense once you consider what would happen without it. Spectators are not distributed evenly around a tennis court, either in number or allegiance. One player may have a spouse watching while the other has an entire team lined up along the fence. Allowing spectators to provide information about disputed calls would create the possibility of resolving disagreements according to who brought the larger audience.
That problem is particularly apparent to me in league tennis. My experience at tournaments has generally been that spectators understand they are spectators. Many are experienced players themselves, and they tend to be familiar with the rules and etiquette surrounding an unofficiated match. They may have very definite opinions about a call, but those opinions generally remain outside the fence.
League tennis can be different. A close match may be watched by teammates and captains whose own team result depends on what is happening on that court. They are not necessarily dishonest observers, but they are hardly disinterested ones. If six teammates believe a ball was out and the opponent who actually has responsibility for the call says it was good, Principle 16 does not allow for a show of hands.
Ironically, that means the population of players who may have the greatest need for this principle is probably also the population least likely to know that it exists. League players can become accustomed to teammates helping with scores, answering rules questions, reacting to calls, and otherwise being immediately outside the fence. From there, it is not difficult for observation to drift into participation.
There is a distinction, however, between watching a match and participating in it. I encountered that distinction rather memorably at Intersectionals a few years ago.
One of my teammates was playing against an opponent who had made a series of what appeared to me to be less-than-generous calls on her own baseline. After the third instance, I walked down to that end of the court and positioned myself where I had a better view. When another questionable call followed, I did not react to it in any way. I was simply standing there watching.
The opponent nevertheless stopped play, flagged down an umpire, and asked that I be removed from my position. As I recall, her complaint was roughly that my presence was interfering with her ability to make line calls. That was patently untrue. I had not attempted to make a call or communicate anything to my teammate, and the previous calls had occurred before I moved down there.
In a delicious irony, her complaint also did not work out quite as intended. The umpire told her that I could remain where I was and that he would stand there with me to make sure I was not interfering. She had objected to the presence of a spectator who had no authority whatsoever to intervene in her calls and inadvertently summoned someone who did. Sometimes things work out exactly the way they should.
Principle 16 does not prohibit spectators from seeing what happens. That would be both impossible and rather destructive to the concept of spectators. I could stand at the baseline and form whatever opinion I wanted about every call. What I could not do was signal my opinion to my teammate, tell her that her opponent had missed a call, or otherwise inject myself into the match. Had I done any of those things, the opponent would have had a legitimate complaint about my conduct.
The bright line in Principle 16 also avoids having to determine which spectators should be trusted. My opponent’s husband in the first story was an experienced player with a good view, and I believed he would give me an honest answer. That did not give his opinion any more standing than the opinion of a teammate watching through three layers of windscreens from two courts away. Once spectators are allowed into the decision-making process, somebody has to decide whose observations count. The Code avoids that problem by excluding all of them.
There is very little historical analysis required for this principle. The equivalent language in the 2001 edition is substantially the same, so this prohibition has survived at least the 25 years covered by our comparison. There is, however, one historical oddity.
Today’s Principle 16 was Principle 17 in the 2001 edition.
That leaves us with an obvious problem in a series that has been proceeding sequentially through The Code. Before we move on to the current Principle 17, we need to account for the Principle 16 that existed in 2001 and apparently disappeared somewhere along the way.
Next week, we interrupt our regularly scheduled sequential progression to find out what happened to it.
- Friend at Court: The Handbook of Tennis Rules and Regulations, USTA, 2026
- Friend at Court: The USTA Handbook of Tennis Rules and Regulations, USTA, 2001. (Hardcopy.)
