Yesterday, I wrote about the USTA’s goal of reaching 35 million tennis players by 2035, along with my concern about what happens when a highly visible growth target begins to influence decisions throughout any organization. There is nothing inherently wrong with measuring participation. In fact, I would argue that any group charged with growing tennis probably ought to know whether more people are actually playing. The problem comes when things that contribute directly to that number become easier to justify than things that are considerably harder to count, but of vital importance to the health of the sport.
One of those harder-to-measure things is what happens to players after they have been successfully drawn into tennis. People do not enter the sport and exhibit the same kind of engagement forever. Some will be perfectly happy playing casually a couple of times a month for the rest of their lives. Others will take lessons, improve, and embark on a journey to see how far they can take their mastery of the sport.
Individual participants count exactly the same in the bottom-line number of total people playing. One tennis player is always one tennis player. However, what diverse players need from the sport is likely to diverge over time.
I think this exposes a distinction between retention and progression that can get lost when we talk about growing tennis. The USTA explicitly includes retention as part of 35 by ’35, and appropriately so. Attracting millions of new players accomplishes little if they quickly leave the sport. But keeping someone within the statistical population of tennis players is a different objective from providing opportunities for those people as their interests and abilities change.
Competitive tennis provides a particularly useful example because the pathway naturally draws from a reduced population as players improve. There are a lot more 3.0 and 3.5 NTRP-rated players than 4.5 and 5.0 players. There will always be more people participating in playing local tournaments than traveling to national age-group Level 1 events. A relatively small number of adult players will routinely qualify for League Sectionals and possibly even Nationals. Fewer still will eventually find themselves playing things like international tournaments and elite team competitions. That narrowing is not evidence that the upper levels of the pathway are not important. Rather, it is an inherent aspect of how competitive growth works.
I certainly did not come back to tennis with the objective of playing at the national level. For that matter, I didn’t know enough about competitive adult tennis at the time to understand what opportunities existed. When I returned to the sport 28 years after aging out of juniors, I simply started playing, got better, and gradually discovered additional ways to engage.
Showing up for a drop-in drill earned me invitations to a couple of local League teams, one of which immediately progressed to Sectionals. Low participation numbers in local tournaments in my area taught me that the competition I was seeking only happens at the Sectional and National levels. Early on in that journey, I had the transformational opportunity to tag along with Team Texas at Intersectionals.
A 3.0 moving to 3.5 has grown as a tennis player even though their contribution to the USTA participation number has not changed. So has the occasional social player who decides to join a league team or the 55-year-old who decides to start playing national age-group tournaments. I have noticed that the USTA is comfortable with the language of player development for juniors, where progression through increasingly advanced levels of competition is expected. Adult recreational players develop too, but they get far less attention.
An overemphasis on raw numbers creates an interesting problem for the organizations responsible for growing the sport. As players move farther along a competitive pathway, fewer people require each successive opportunity. That makes the programs that serve their needs look increasingly inefficient if participation is the primary measure of value.
As players progress on the competitive pathway as adults, engagement opportunities narrow and require significantly more personal investment of time and other resources. Instead of playing for their local club, stronger players must drive farther to find a team. At the elite levels, players have to get on a plane to find competitive matches. Instead of making that investment, some players will drop down to occasional social play. Others will drop their engagement with the sport entirely because they simply do not have an appropriate engagement mechanism.
When players stick with the sport despite those challenges, their participation maintains the status quo. When high-mastery players stop playing altogether, their absence amounts to nothing more than statistical noise on bottom-line participation.
This is one reason I am wary of treating small participation numbers as evidence that a program has correspondingly little value. Sometimes small numbers indicate a program that no longer justifies the resources required to sustain it. Programs should not continue indefinitely simply because someone values them. At other times, however, small numbers are an expected outcome of serving a specialized population that is vital to the sport. We need to distinguish between those situations.
Senior tournament tennis provides a shining example. Age-group draws inevitably become smaller as the population dwindles and the level of competition rises. A national tournament for experienced players will never produce the participation numbers of an introductory tennis free play day. Evaluating the two against the same growth objective would tell us very little about whether either engagement mechanism is doing its job.
The same applies to some of the niche competitive opportunities that exist within the sport. Intersectionals for senior women and the Donoff Cup, which is the equivalent event for the men, are both good examples. Relatively few adult tennis players will ever participate in those events, and eliminating either event tomorrow would presumably have no perceptible effect on whether the United States reaches 35 million players. Yet the existence of opportunities like that gives competitive players somewhere else to go. Such events create another level to pursue.
This is where the shape of the system matters. If we are successful at attracting millions of new players, some percentage of them will become more serious about tennis. Some will improve rapidly. Some will want competition beyond whatever initially brought them into the sport. The absolute number of people reaching those smaller programs could actually increase as the participation base grows, even though they continue to represent a tiny fraction of all tennis players.
That means a successful growth strategy can eventually create more demand for the very programs that look least consequential to the growth metric.
There is also a retention consequence that in my experience is routinely neglected. Players who cannot find appropriate competition do not necessarily quit tennis the following day. They improvise. They play down, travel farther, organize their own matches, or accept competition that is less satisfying than what they previously had. Participation statistics can continue to count them while their connection to organized tennis gradually weakens. By the time someone stops participating in USTA programs, the decision that contributed to that disengagement may be several years in the past.
None of this means every existing league, tournament, or championship must be preserved. Tennis changes. Player interests change. Resources are finite, and occasionally a program really has outlived its usefulness. Maintaining a healthy competitive structure requires making those decisions too.
But participation alone cannot tell us which programs those are.
Yesterday, I wrote that growing tennis requires paying attention to what happens after players arrive. I think we need to go one step farther. If 35 by ’35 succeeds, we should expect millions of those players to change their relationship with tennis over the following years. The pathways available to them need to accommodate that development, including the increasingly small populations who achieve higher mastery and rise above what a sport largely driven by the 3.5 tennis at the center of the bell curve can give them.
Getting people through the front door is the first challenge. We also need somewhere for them to go once they are inside. Tomorrow, I want to look at what it takes to maintain that larger structure, particularly when some of the things necessary for a healthy tennis ecosystem will never make much of a contribution to the number 35 million.
