Three Day Weekend Tournament Survey

A couple of weeks ago this site shot out a survey to capture player preferences about scheduling three day tennis tournaments. That initiative was motivated because in my Section, most tournaments are scheduled to run Friday through Sunday. However, there are some players that strongly prefer Saturday through Monday events. It seemed like an opportune time for a straw poll on what the majority of the players actually want.

67 people responded to the survey and the completion rate was 100%. I collected USTA Section residency demographic data on this instrument. The Sectional distribution for this survey was pretty clear: We are Texas. However, there is a reasonable smattering of people who responded from many of the other Sections with active tournament players.

Editorial Note: If you don’t see a pie chart immediately after this paragraph, then your email privacy settings are likely blocking images. I recommend viewing this post directly on fiendatcourt.com because the words will probably make more sense with the pictures.

I am not going to provide specific numbers or graphs, but the data once again showed that the majority who responded to this survey are indeed active tournament players. In fact over half of the respondents play in 5 or more tournaments per year.

The primary question that motivated the survey was this: “What is your general preference on how a three day tennis tournament should be scheduled?” The results are pretty clear that most players prefer a Friday start date.

I also asked a series of questions to gauge the strength of sentiment behind those results. All mechanisms pretty much told the same story. The most clear representation of that data is in the table below. Players were presented with two tournament scheduling options and could only select one response for each row. The preference for a Friday start is emotionally strong.

Since the survey collected Sectional demographic data, I was able to filter out the results from Texas to see if there was any evidence of regional variation in the preferences. That is summarized across the following three pie charts.

(All)

(Texas Only)

(All But Texas)

That exercise revealed that with Texas, the response to the “What is your general preference on how a three day tennis tournament should be scheduled?” question is more polarized than in the rest of the USTA Sections. It is kind of an eye chart, but players from other Sections provided the majority of the “no preference” responses reflected in the yellow slice.

Tomorrow I will leverage some of the comments received to talk about the motivations and personal situations that drove these responses. In my limited experience conducting these surveys… the comments are proving to be a gold mine.