Growing Tennis in 2021

These days it only takes a longboard, some Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry and that Stevie Nicks vibe to distract me from putting down thoughts on tennis. They say legacy brands like Ocean Spray are seeing massive sales numbers during the pandemic as consumers come home to comfort foods and products that offer certainty during uncertain times.

For tennis fans, having any form of ATP, WTA or even ITA tennis the last few months has been a sorely missed diversion. Grateful that tennis leads the way as a socially distanced sport, with continuing storylines of dominance (Nadal) and disgrace (Djokovic), the year in tennis provided several memorable moments that will be talked about for decades. Yet, one must acknowledge that tennis is not comfort food for the average sports fan in the U.S. Ask an American what they think about decisions to reorganize the 2021 tennis schedule and they will look at you with a blank stare.

While tennis is one of the most popular spectator sports in the world, with an estimated following of over one billion people (surpassing the NBA, NFL and MLB), the popularity and reach of tennis in the United States is palpably in retreat. Much has been written about the junior competitive pathway, the factors that keep potential tennis players from finding the game, and the strange investment strategy the USTA employs to grow the sport. One must also acknowledge how tennis participation lags population share among African Americans (8.9 to 13.4%).

Keeping tennis relevant in the United States is tied to how tennis events are produced for television. When tennis was booming in the 70s and 80s, it was network television that brought the game out of the country clubs to the masses. When tennis was relatively new as a professional sport (the Open Era), network television had a captive audience and tennis had a stable of personalities who were also some of the greatest athletes in the world.

Pro tennis events are best in person when a fan can roam the grounds surveying a smörgåsbord of options between men’s and women’s singles and doubles; and if they’re lucky, find a spot to view multiple matches at once. Live college tennis has that same festival atmosphere. Most college meets begin with three simultaneous sets of doubles across three courts. The event then moves to six courts of singles action, where each match counts for a point on the big scoreboard. Throw in a partisan crowd and things get wild. Still, nobody seems to have figured out how to produce college tennis compellingly for TV. Some of that is a function of limited resources.  Yet, even ESPN, when it carries the NCAA team tennis finals, misses the story while it’s unfolding. The immediacy of the team element is mostly ignored. The smörgåsbord is left on the table.

College matches are not the only disappointment in television coverage of tennis. Many casual observers lack an appreciation for the speed of the game, or the physicality that used to make Dick Enberg exclaim, “Oh my!” The camera angle during live points has not changed since 1939. TV producers experiment with new perspectives from time to time, but television is never content to let viewers see a point from ground level for more than a serve and return; always reverting to the long view of the court.

While the long view has its place, why not try a full point from a fixed corner, or from over the shoulder of the server? If viewers can understand what 130mph looks like at ground level, they will appreciate the speed of the game. With new camera angles and more variety, fans may see how patterns open the court from the players’ perspective.

Understanding what is happening strategically in a tennis match is a challenge for seasoned fans, much less casual observers. Television viewers get no help whatsoever from tennis announcers. Tennis announcing has been the object of mockery for a long time now. I always think back to the vapid announcers in Terrence McNally’s 2007 Broadway play, Deuce.

Tennis announcing today reflects a conversation in the player’s lounge circa 1990; gossipy, fratty, white and only peripherally attuned to tennis. What once seemed connected to the inside game is now completely out of touch and insulting on many levels. Tennis announcing today degrades the sport. Consider the insane obsession of TV announcers this past year discussing players on the women’s tour who are also mothers. How backwards is the thinking to believe the world’s greatest female athletes would be challenged to continue competing while raising a child? What year is it? Why is this notable beyond a brief mention in the context of a return to fitness after pregnancy? Why are we in awe that women can have careers and be mothers? Can Victoria Azarenka not afford child care on a weekend? Is there a player on tour raising a child alone? Is it really that inspiring to realize a tennis career is not finished with childbirth? Hearing Chrissie Evert and Pam Shriver discuss this marvelous new world is like hearing one’s great grandmother discuss knee-length skirts. And they do this on live television!

Tennis on TV doesn’t just provide little of substance, it alienates casual observers the sport needs to convert into fans. The “voice” of tennis is out of touch with our time. It’s not diverse, it’s not cool, it expresses none of the urgency and immediacy of the battle on court. Tennis coverage on TV also leaves the most loyal fans without an ounce of insight into the modern game. Analytics has taught us so much that was previously hidden about tennis. Analytics leaders like Craig O’Shannessy and Warren Pretorius have redefined strategy for touring pros and college players. O’Shannessy has written extensively about which stats matter most to winning and losing and how training should change to reflect this. Yet, the lead announcers and former champions who call tennis on TV struggle to describe the game as it is played today.

The statistics that most determine winning and losing (forehands on first shot after serve, rally length, net point %, forehand %) are completely missing from tennis coverage on TV. Instead, serve speed, aces and unforced errors dominate the light statistical discussion. Talk of “unforced errors” often devolves into psychobabble about nerves and inner strength. I mean what could be less useful to tennis viewers than discussion of a meaningless statistic that isn’t even real? Unforced errors? Anyone who has ever played at a reasonably competitive level of tennis knows, there is no such thing as an unforced error. Every error is forced in some way, by varying degrees. The idea that a professional tennis player can become more competitive if they could just stop making mistakes, stop choking, insults the players and the viewer’s intelligence. Are we to believe that the world’s fittest athletes are just out there goofing up?

I grant that even pros miss “sitting winners.” These moments are rare. They are not the majority of “unforced errors” and they don’t have meaningful statistical impact on the match result. Yet, former world champions, who know better, are handed stat sheets in the broadcast booth and feel obligated to mention which player has more or fewer unforced errors without discussing the myriad ways a player’s technique has been broken down by their opponent.

Restructuring the professional schedule, increased coverage of college tennis and unionization of touring professionals are all on the agenda for 2021. However, if I have only one wish for tennis in the new year, it would be for television coverage to bring fans closer to the strategic game. O’Shannessy’s work reveals the true battles within a tennis match. Helping a nation of rabid sports fans follow the action will go a long way to growing tennis again.   – Jeff Menaker

Glimmers of Hope for College Tennis

With the daily announcement of cuts to athletic departments at universities across the country, the impact of COVID-19 on educational budgets weighs heavily on the tennis community. With the shocking termination of men’s tennis at UConn and men’s and women’s tennis at Winthrop (programs with staunch alumni and historical success), it feels like no program is safe. As of July 14,  CovidTeamTracker.com lists 65 college sports cut since March at Division 1 schools. Men’s tennis leads all of those sports with 11 cut programs.

Here are the tennis programs dropped within the last year:
Connecticut Men
Northern Colorado M&W
Southern Utah M&W
Winthrop M&W
Appalachian State Men
Arkansas Pine Bluff  M&W
Wright State M&W
East Carolina M&W
Florida A&M Men
UMKC Men
USC Upstate M&W

UW Green Bay M&W

Valparaiso Men

Pittsburgh Women (Men cut previously)

Akron Women (Men cut previously)

Detroit M&W

There has been no shortage of preaching from college tennis’ privileged class on strategies coaches can use to keep tennis off the chopping block. Most of it is how to run a good tennis program when you have a massive athletics department around you. I always chuckle when a Pac-12 coach at some symposium advises coaches of at-risk programs to bring a suitcase of hats and t-shirts whenever the team travels, to distribute among supporters in the airports, hotels and tennis clubs. Forming those relationships is certainly critical to fundraising and creating excitement about your team. Having those t-shirts, having a budget to fly, having tennis courts to even host a match, having alumni all over the country is why the Pac-12 coach has a six figure salary and a stable job. The coach of a tennis program that is about to be cut is often part-time, the 5th coach the program has seen in the last 10 years, managing both the men and women, and making do with outdated or off-campus facilities in an environment of limited resources and mismanagement.

Economic crises always expose fiscal mismanagement, no matter what industry you’re looking at. Cutting sports is a tacit admission of mismanagement for a university. At mid-major schools like those listed above, the culprit is often delusional ambition. So many of the schools now cutting tennis have gotten out over their skis in funding projects peripheral to their educational mission and the mission of athletics as curriculum (or at least complimentary to curriculum). This usually takes the form of over-emphasis on football.

The trend of $500K strength coaches, the mere existence of “quality control” coaches, locker room waterfalls, and team hotels the night before home games, are just a sprinkling of the waste around college football. Increasingly, we see schools with zero national recognition in football following a fantasy path to BCS riches in lieu of professional planning and fiscal realism. The money wasted expanding football stadiums and press box suites at universities like East Carolina, Northern Colorado and UConn are prime examples of failing to know your market. At East Carolina, we’re talking about a region saturated with football, where the SEC and ACC take up nearly all the oxygen in the room. At UConn, the idea that college football will be a golden goose, worth substantial investment, could not be more preposterous. With the Patriots, Jets and Giants, Connecticut is in the middle of pro sports Mecca. The Northeast has shown far more appetite for indoor college basketball than cold, blustery Saturdays of mid-major football. Even the first college football program, Rutgers, and their Big-10 neighbors, Maryland, struggle to fill their stands.

A school like Stanford, which is not a mid-major and did not cut tennis, has an endowment of  $27.7 billion. Yet, Stanford cut 11 sports this month to cover the university’s $12 million deficit. Something is off here. The school is still required to honor coaches’ contracts and student athlete scholarships. So it’s hard to fathom how cutting the operating budgets of 11 “Olympic” sports plugs a gap athletics did not cause. The intention is clear: the 240 student athletes affected by the cuts is the exact number of students needed at full-price tuition to cover $12 million per year. Instead of cutting those sports and praying the remaining athletes will transfer, if Stanford transitioned a segment of incoming athletes to non-scholarship, made intelligent cuts to operating budgets and future coaching contracts, one could argue adding sports would have been a better path.

Adding sports may seem irresponsible in a fiscal crisis, but athletics-generated tuition is an underappreciated, quantifiable, revenue stream. What school doesn’t covet increased tuition revenue and capacity enrollment? A school without tennis programs, could add non-scholarship men’s and women’s tennis and attract 20-25 tuition-paying athletes who would not have considered the school without the offering of competitive Division 1 tennis. At a state school, many of those students would come from out of state and pay a higher tuition rate. Depending on the school, that could translate to $1.25 million in annual tuition from tennis alone. The school could fund tennis with 15-20% of that $1.25 million and have over $1 million left, each year.

While scholarship athletes may take space from paying students at capacity enrollment Stanford, that isn’t the case at most mid-majors. Adding sports, transitioning to non-scholarship athletes, or both, is a great way for mid-majors to increase tuition income. Don’t tell me non-scholarship teams can’t compete. There are nationally ranked tennis programs that are part of Division 1 conferences like the Patriot League and the Ivy League where athletic scholarships are prohibited. Columbia’s Men’s Tennis team has never lost to Pac-12 power Stanford. Ever. Non-scholarship can be a very competitive model, even at the Division 1 level.

COVID will certainly have its way with university budgets and enrollment. The financial implications of not playing college football this fall will vary from school to school. Among mid-majors, where tennis is most at risk, canceling football is going to save some schools money. Others, that miss out on a payout from playing a Power 5 opponent, could suffer. Of course, university leadership will always mandate cuts in the face of financial hardship. Institutional focus and accounting are often two ships passing in the night. It’s up to athletic directors to demonstrate revenue, push expansion of a tuition-paying athletics model and explain how cutting sports often translates to lost tuition and larger deficits. Non-scholarship athletes, who enroll specifically for a sport, are a stream of revenue that is not easily replaced during difficult times.

Bad accounting practice is so pervasive in education that athletic directors, under relentless budget pressure from above, have been accused of colluding to determine which sports they can cut, together, across a conference. When that starts happening, you have a few rogue administrators making existential decisions for a conference of their competitors and for student athletes across that conference. That gets into the realm of unfair business practice laws that prevent industries from colluding in a way that damages competitors or eliminates a segment of the industry.

This is where national-level leadership comes into play. The ITA (Intercollegiate Tennis Association) the governing body of college tennis, works with the NCAA, NJCAA, USCAA and NAIA to administer tennis across the country. College tennis is under assault. It would be great to see the ITA take a more aggressive stance in matters where a member job disappears, athletic directors engage in unfair business practices or a school cuts a tennis program in violation of Title IX. Too often, tennis coaches and parents are alone in mounting legal challenges to obvious Title IX violations (see Albany, Pitt). Other sports don’t have an ITA to file grievances. If we are to keep the interests of tennis on the forefront, the ITA needs to be willing to fight back. If college presidents and athletic administrators know that tennis is the sport you will get sued for cutting, the dynamic would change rapidly.

Title IX is not just a proportionality law. It’s an opportunity/access law. When schools make the short-sighted decision to cut sports, they cannot cut women’s sports without counterbalancing the proportion of male athletes. They eliminate men’s sports to “stay compliant.” This is where men’s tennis so often gets cut. However, it is false compliance to reduce opportunity for women. The choice to eliminate any women’s sport, while protecting a bloated football budget, is discriminatory. What women’s sport commands protection from any and all cuts the way football does? When eliminating no sport or adding sports is a reasonable, feasible alternative, any cut to women’s sports is a Title IX violation that deserves its day in court. If cutting men’s tennis is “compliance” for cutting women’s rowing, the ITA needs to be in court on behalf of those rowers and the interests of tennis. The ITA has had no in-house counsel until [checks notes] yesterday! Here’s hoping they found a Marvin Miller!

There is another flicker of good news amidst the wave of program cuts and COVID madness. While Division 1 mid-majors are most likely to exhibit the unreasonable expectations and poor fiscal management that lead to sad reckonings, several Division 2 schools have demonstrated proper planning as part of their efforts to join Division 1. Where several mid-majors have collapsed under the financial strains of 2008 and 2020, a new crop of fiscally sound Division 1 programs has risen from Division 2, with healthy tennis programs in tow. Welcome St. Thomas, Bellarmine, Merrimack, Dixie State, Tarleton State, UC San Diego and North Alabama. We’re going to hear a lot more about you (if we can ever learn to wear a mask in this country).

On a bit of a side note, the Division 2 model is increasingly bizarre. Any school that can pay young athletes to study there and has steady enrollment should be in Division 1. The process of moving to Division 1 is a good litmus test of sustainability. Ultimately, I am optimistic that well-managed Division 2 institutions can continue taking the place of declining mid-majors. Still, without a little sanity in college football and a little fight from college tennis’ governing body, the drip drip drip of poorly conceived (and sometimes illegal) program cuts will continue.

– Jeff Menaker