A couple of weeks ago, I tested positive for Covid. My symptoms remained mild, but the Trophy Husband is still undergoing chemotherapy, which periodically compromises his immunity. As a result, it was prudent to isolate myself from him until I was fully confident I was no longer contagious. Unfortunately, while I felt fine relatively quickly, my rapid tests remained stubbornly positive for well over a week. As a result, I spent a lot of quality time alone, isolated in the part of our house that includes my home office.
At some point, that isolation turned into a fairly aggressive decluttering and reorganization initiative. (As a bonus, that required designing and printing some custom storage accessories on my 3D printer.) I filled up the bin on my shredder three times over. Somewhere in that process, I came across an old document outlining the USTA Strategic Priorities that I had printed out during the short tenure of former USTA CEO Michael Dowse.
It was like a time capsule from another era. It is particularly interesting in light of the USTA’s current 35 by ’35 initiative. The old document identified five strategic priorities. The first called for attracting, engaging, and retaining new generations of tennis participants. Another focused on the tennis delivery system, provider education, facilities, and consumer experience. Digital infrastructure and financial performance received their own priorities. The final one called for collaboration within the USTA and the larger tennis ecosystem “for the common good of tennis.”
Much of the DNA of the current growth strategy is in that document. In the intervening years, the USTA now has a much more specific and directly measurable objective. 35 by ‘35 is to make the United States the world’s number one tennis-playing nation by reaching 35 million players by 2035. Retention, coaching, and court infrastructure remain part of that strategy. One key difference is that the target of 35 million provides a clear benchmark for measuring progress.
I have no objection to that objective. Tennis has been enormously important in my life, and I would be delighted to see millions more people discover the sport. More players also create demand for courts, coaches, competition, and programming. There are plenty of reasons why growing tennis is good for tennis.
However, there is a foundational engineering maxim that you get what you measure. The purpose of a metric is to make progress visible, but measurement also influences behavior. Once an organization establishes a highly visible objective like 35 million players, decisions that demonstrably contribute to that number become easier to justify. Programs that serve existing players, maintain competitive opportunities, or otherwise contribute to the health of tennis may be harder to defend when their value does not translate cleanly into additional participants. That does not make the metric wrong. It means we also need to pay attention to what the metric does not measure.
Consequently, I have become increasingly concerned about the degree to which growth appears to be the primary driver of decisions throughout the USTA. I hear it invoked in discussions about programs and priorities at multiple levels of the organization. That does not mean those decisions are necessarily wrong, but a highly visible organizational objective can influence which problems receive attention and which investments are easiest to justify.
This is a fairly common problem with metrics. Things that can be counted are easier to demonstrate as successful. A program that introduces 10,000 people to tennis has an obvious relationship to 35 by ’35. Maintaining a viable 5.0 league, supporting a senior tournament with a small draw, or improving a competitive opportunity used by a few hundred experienced players has a relationship that is considerably harder to quantify.
It cannot be emphasized enough that those things still contribute to the health of tennis.
The distinction takes me back to the wording of the older strategic priorities. Growth appeared throughout that document, but so did retention, consumer experience, competitive and social players, facilities, financial health, organizational relationships, and the tennis ecosystem. Those objectives were not equally measurable, and they were not all expected to produce large numbers of new players. Collectively, they described many of the things required to support the sport.
The current 35 by ’35 strategy also recognizes several of those dependencies. Player retention is one of its primary components, and the emphasis on coaching and court infrastructure acknowledges that adding players without providing coaches or places for them to play would create obvious problems. My concern is less about what the strategy says than what can happen as a numerical objective propagates through a large organization.
By the time a strategy works its way through National, Sections, local organizations, committees, staff, and individual programs, a complicated objective can become a much simpler instruction: grow tennis. Activities that can demonstrate growth have an obvious argument for resources. Activities that primarily maintain something serving the players we already have may have a harder time making the same case.
Some activities will always serve relatively small populations. A competitive program used by a few hundred players nationally is never going to make a big contribution toward reaching 35 million. The players using it may nevertheless be among the most engaged people in the sport. They support tennis in countless ways through coaching, volunteering, and serving as ambassadors.
There is also a larger structural consideration. Tennis players do not remain beginners. Some people may be perfectly happy playing casually a couple of times a month, while others may improve and want to seek stronger competition. The competitive pathway of leagues, tournaments, and elite competitive programs each serve increasingly smaller populations. The fact that fewer people reach those parts of the system does not make those opportunities optional or unnecessary.
That is where I think growth and the health of tennis can become disconnected. We can delude ourselves that it is possible to increase the number of people entering the sport while simultaneously allowing opportunities farther along the pathway to deteriorate. In the short term, the participation number could continue moving in the desired direction even as parts of the experience available to established players become less healthy.
I keep returning to one phrase in the old strategic priorities document: “for the common good of tennis.” It is an imprecise objective, which is inherently difficult to measure. There is no dashboard that can tell us whether every decision ultimately contributes to the common good of tennis. Assessment requires considering effects that do not show up in raw participation numbers.
Thirty-five million players by 2035 would be a tremendous accomplishment, and I hope the USTA gets there. At the same time, I also think the condition of the sport those 35 million people experience is equally important. Growing tennis requires bringing more people into the game, but maintaining a healthy tennis ecosystem requires paying attention to what happens after they arrive.
Tomorrow, I want to take a deeper look at that second kind of growth. If we are successful at bringing millions of additional people into tennis, we also need to make sure they have room to grow once they get here.
