Yesterday, I wrote about the increasingly narrow competitive pathway that tennis players encounter as they improve. There are fewer 4.5 players than 3.5 players, fewer 5.0 players than 4.5 players, and progressively fewer people pursuing national age-group tournaments and elite team competitions. That is an expected characteristic of a competitive pathway. Each successive level draws from a smaller population capable of reaching it.
The obvious consequence is that programs serving players at the top will always look relatively inefficient if participation is the primary measure of value. A national event serving a few hundred highly engaged players cannot compete numerically with an introductory program capable of putting racquets in the hands of thousands of people. Yesterday, I argued that we nevertheless need those smaller programs because tennis players require somewhere to go as they improve.
The tip of the pyramid determines how tall the pyramid can be. When an opportunity at the top disappears, the players who previously occupied that space no longer have that particular competitive option. Whether they adjust their play or stop engaging with the sport entirely, the effect is the same. The competitive landscape immediately below the eliminated opportunity becomes the new tip of the pyramid.
Over time, that new tip is subjected to exactly the same numerical challenge as the old one. It serves fewer players than the levels below it. If you take that logic far enough, the problem becomes obvious. If small participation numbers are sufficient justification for eliminating opportunities at the top, there is no natural stopping point. Remove one layer and another small layer is exposed. What initially looks like a decision affecting a tiny population can eventually shorten the competitive pathway available to everyone.
There is a related danger in framing this entirely as a question of what we should preserve. Some parts of the competitive pathway have already deteriorated enough that maintaining the status quo is not sufficient. I will personally cite the struggling tournament calendar and declining participation in upper-level leagues in my area as areas that arguably require deliberate investment to become healthy again.
Protecting advanced competitive opportunities should not be viewed simply as providing benefits to a relatively privileged group of accomplished tennis players. In some respects, those players are the least dependent upon organizational support. They are already willing to spend substantial amounts of their own time and money pursuing tennis. Many travel considerable distances to compete. If one opportunity disappears, they have the resources and motivation to find another one. However, we cannot ignore the impacts on those who follow.
In yesterday’s post, I shared that I didn’t return to tennis knowing that I wanted to play national senior tournaments or Intersectionals. Those destinations became relevant only after I played enough to see them. Had the pathway ended earlier, I might never have known what was missing. I simply would have encountered the endpoint of organized competition sooner.
If the USTA succeeds in the 35 by ’35 initiative, it will bring millions of additional people into tennis. Theoretically, that should eventually produce more players at every level. Most will remain recreational players, which is perfectly fine. Some percentage will improve enough to need stronger competition. A much smaller percentage will eventually reach the tip. The percentages can get progressively smaller while the actual number of people requiring those opportunities grows.
Preserving that structure requires more than saying that advanced competition is valuable. Organizations respond to incentives, and 35 by ’35 naturally favors activities that can demonstrate participation growth. At the same time, it is important to measure more than just the total number of people playing tennis.
If the USTA truly wants to understand the health of the entire sport, it needs indicators that can detect both growth and deterioration that a national participation number cannot reveal. In particular, the patterns around the endpoints and edge cases can reveal problems that aggregate participation will never reveal.
If you want to understand what is actually important to an organization, the strongest indicator of that is to follow the money. The financial relationship between USTA National and its 17 Sections is revealing. The USTA is structured with a model that grants a high degree of autonomy to the Sections in determining how tennis is administered within their geographic areas.
USTA membership is directly connected to the funding each Section receives from National, although the current formula is more complicated than simply multiplying the number of members in each Section by a fixed dollar amount. The key point for today is that membership is a primary driver of the funds each Section receives.
Thus, each Section is incentivized to grow participation in order to maximize its funding. Imagine a Section deciding how to allocate limited staff time and money between two programs. One is designed to attract new players or convert existing casual players into USTA members. The other preserves a specialized competitive opportunity for a relatively small number of experienced players who are already members.
The first program has several advantages when the organization is exclusively focused on growth. New members increase the Section’s membership base. The second program doesn’t do that because the people it serves already play tennis and already belong to the USTA. Keeping their competitive opportunity intact does not add them to the participation total because they were already there.
A Section does not have to be indifferent to advanced players for the financial incentives to make a difference. In fact, everyone involved could sincerely value the elite players and yet still reach the same resource decision. If one program produces measurable growth while another primarily preserves an existing opportunity for a small subset of total players, the growth program has a much easier case to make when money is limited. Repeat that decision across enough budgets and enough years and the structure can gradually change without anyone ever intentionally or consciously deciding that the competitive pathway should become shorter.
This is where funding design can compensate for the limitations of a growth metric. USTA National could explicitly designate some resources for competitive opportunities that serve small but necessary populations. One approach would be to identify mandatory initiatives that each Section was required to support. An even better approach would be to directly fund those things at the National level. The optimal approach would probably mix those two methods.
Most people will never reach the highest levels available to them, just as most junior tennis players will never play for a Division I college or on the professional tours. We don’t normally conclude from that fact that the higher levels have no role in the developmental structure below them. However, the fact that those destinations exist inspires many people toward aspirational engagement.
The old USTA strategic priorities document that started me thinking about all of this used the phrase “for the common good of tennis.” After spending three days thinking about 35 by ’35, I increasingly appreciate the usefulness of that original deliberately imprecise objective. Thirty-five million gives us something important that we can count. The common good of tennis requires us to pay attention to some things we cannot.
If we want 35 million people playing tennis in 2035, we should certainly make it easier for non-tennis players to engage with the sport. At the same time, we also need to preserve somewhere worth going once they get good at it. The tip of the pyramid may contain the fewest players, but it determines how high it is possible for everyone to climb.
