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part-time, the 5th coach the program has seen in the last 10 years, managing both the men and women, and making do with outdated or off-campus facilities in an environment of limited resources and mismanagement.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

Simultaneous Format can save NCAA Tennis

In summer of 2015, the NCAA Division I Competition Oversight Committee, following the lead of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA), approved no-ad scoring for all matches at the NCAA Team Tennis Championships, starting in 2016.

In no-ad scoring, when a game is tied at 40-40 (deuce), the player who wins the next point wins the game. In normal scoring, games are played until a player wins by two. If you don’t win by two, the score reverts “back to deuce.” No-ad scoring was promoted in the 1970s by Jimmy Van Alen, father of the tiebreaker. It was embraced by World Team Tennis, college tennis and high schools. However, college coaches returned their game to standard scoring in the 1990s with the prevailing feeling that no-ad cheapened the sport and failed to prepare their elite players for the pros.

Nevertheless, in 2014, the NCAA Division I Men’s & Women’s Tennis Committee, with support from ITA and USTA, made a recommendation to modify the D-I tennis championships for the stated purpose of reducing match length. No-ad scoring was then adopted in 2016 and extended to all regular-season matches across Division I with several other changes designed to speed up college tennis. Those measures also included the absurdity of reducing doubles matches to a six-game set.

These changes reflected serious concern. A lack of television coverage at the time and athletic directors cutting tennis programs in the residual funding crisis of the Great Recession raised alarm bells across the tennis world. The future of college tennis was keeping the sport away from fickle athletic directors’ chopping blocks. This was particularly true for men’s tennis, which does not counterbalance any male football scholarships for athletic programs with Title IX considerations. That tennis is one of the oldest sports in our collegiate athletic tradition, with comparatively tiny budgets, has not swayed overextended athletic directors from cutting storied tennis programs. There’s nothing suggesting that trend will stop with renewed financial hardship. After COVID-19, the existence of tennis as an NCAA sport will undoubtedly come up for debate.

The idea that college tennis should create some revenue, most effectively through television coverage, is not unreasonable. However, growing the status of the game goes beyond keeping tennis meaningful to athletic directors. Getting matches on TV is one thing, but building attendance for live matches is what ignites tennis on campus and in communities. Baylor men’s coach, Brian Boland, was interviewed about no-ad by Zootennis back in 2014: “College coaches want to skip the hard work to get people engaged. [No-ad] is not the answer at all. I went to the College World Series (in Omaha) to support my good friend and neighbor and several of the games lasted over four hours, but I doubt they’re looking to go to six innings. They respect their game and have tremendous leadership.”

There is a clear divide between those like Boland, with a Field of Dreams approach to building up the game, and those who see made-for-TV events as a silver bullet. While a mere set for doubles is definitely a bitter pill, what really keeps the traditionalist coach from accepting the NCAA’s speed-the-game measures is no-ad scoring. There are unintended consequences of no-ad. While time-saving measures have managed to cut college meets by 30 minutes or more, observers of junior tennis know all too well, no-ad scoring is the cheater’s paradise. Having coached or been a spectator at dozens of college matches over the last few years, the majority of questionable line calls happen on deuce/deciding point. The most shared moment of the 2018 NCAA Men’s Singles Tournament on Twitter was the public shaming of a player for an unfortunate line call in the quarterfinals. Was it a no-ad deuce point? You betcha! This is not a good look for college sports and it’s exactly what athletic directors don’t want to see from tennis.

The tennis blog excoriating no-ad has become a bit of a cliché in recent years, but there are many solid arguments being made against it. Winning by two is a fundamental tenet of racquet sports like tennis and other games that derive from Jeu de Paume, because fluky stuff affects points all the time.

Chuck Kriese, who literally wrote the book on coaching tennis during his years at Clemson, demolished no-ad scoring back in 1988 in an interview with Randy Walker, “We’ve got to get rid of [no-ad] if we’re going to do anything for American tennis.” For Kriese, no-ad was hurting the development of college players by creating a “choking” environment at deuce for the game’s most talented athletes. Taking an analytical view: “If I’m an underdog, I’d want to play no-ad all the time… The statistics on Compu-Tennis show that as kids come up through the age groups, 12’s 14′s, 16′s, 18′s, they have more and more aggressive play. On key points, our college players play more tentative than 18 year-olds.”

Leaving aside the stunting of player development which Kriese saw in the analytics, or the cheating empowered by sudden death, or the abandonment of a character-building scoring format, what is most irksome about Division I reverting to no-ad is a lost opportunity to reconfigure the event itself. Recognizing that a traditional tennis match is already an amazing fan experience, maximize that game’s exposure. The one thing no-ad scoring may help, a product that fits TV time constraints, is easily achieved without using no-ad.

Since 1977, NCAA team tennis has been played as some variation of six singles matches and three doubles matches in a “dual match” format. Players may play both singles and doubles in a day’s meet. There have been several iterations which lasted all day. It was beautiful for extremely committed spectators, but, ultimately bad for the game and bad for student athletes. Currently, a Division I dual features three courts of doubles; just a six game set on each court. These three bastardized doubles sets count altogether for just one team point or the equivalent of one singles point. This renders doubles mostly impotent in a seven point team contest. Doubles is followed by six singles matches worth one point each. Unlike doubles, these matches are best of three sets.

In all the formats since 1977, courts must be turned over once, accommodating doubles players who also play singles. Even with doubles reduced to a single set, we’re still asking fans to attend something akin to a baseball double-header every time they come out to see a match. This is the crux of college tennis’ time challenge. The solution is staring us in the face. Stop turning over courts. There are singles players and there are doubles players and they don’t need to play both in one dual. One might get to play both over the course of a season and certainly there are individual events for both. However, in a dual match, the substance of a college tennis season, everything should happen simultaneously. This is how high school tennis works nearly everywhere.

Because tennis has been played in a format requiring no more than six courts at a time, most schools with budget considerations have the minimum six courts for their tennis programs. Any reconfiguration of college tennis format must take this into account because the first way to lose a tennis program is to make facilities a problem for athletic directors.

The restructuring of the format should fit to six courts in simultaneous use. There are several options in this vein worth debating. My own preference would be four singles matches played simultaneously with two doubles matches. This provides opportunities for more players to participate in a meet than the typical six or seven. It allows matches to be played using standard scoring. Without court turnover, a team tennis event fits into a TV broadcast like any ATP match. Doubles or singles could be weighted more heavily to avoid a 3-3 tie, or, better yet, a 3-3 tie could trigger an exciting overtime in which coaches could chose any players on their roster to play a doubles tiebreaker or a full doubles set.

Listen, any option is better than the cheater’s paradise we visit all too frequently through no-ad scoring. Like it or hate it, no-ad scoring in college tennis was a cheap fix to a problem that needed more investment. When the economic impact of COVID-19 decimates college athletics (it already has), tennis needs to be very efficient and very relevant to survive. It’s time to consider simultaneous format.

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It’s a little late, but I wanted to use this space to pay tribute to legendary Smith College Coach Chris Davis for receiving the ITA’s Meritorious Service Award in December. Chris, who I hereby nominate for Commissioner of Professional Tennis, coached for 39 years at Smith College. Not surprisingly, she was an early champion of simultaneous format dating back decades to the Seven Sisters Team Tournaments in New England. Way to go, Chris!

Tennis Hygiene and COVID-19

The COVID-19 public health crisis and the suspension of the NCAA, ATP and WTA tennis seasons bring to mind a long-simmering hygiene problem in professional tennis.

As the Governor of New York announced his quarantine order yesterday, closing non-essential businesses and asking citizens to stay in their homes, a wave of relief came over me. Somebody in government has finally taken a bold step to thwart the scourge of COVID-19 and to mitigate its effects, flatten the curve, until our best and brightest scientists and doctors can get ahead of this predicted global pandemic. With tennis lessons on hiatus, a porch bench sanded and painted, and no Miami Open to watch on TV, the post I’ve been meaning to write since February is finally on the screen before me. Play The Let, Quarantine Edition: Tennis has a hygiene problem and there couldn’t be a better time to discuss it and hopefully make a lasting change.

I was reminded of this hygiene issue while sitting courtside at the New York ATP 250 event at Nassau Coliseum last month. The #4 seed was ill. He had received a bye in the first round and had beaten Marcos Giron handily to set up a quarterfinal with upcoming Serbian, Miomir Kecmanovic. As the match with Kecmanovic wore on, it was clear the #4 was ailing. His eyes were glassy. He was walking slowly between points, clearing his throat repeatedly on changeovers. He was the higher seed, but he was on his way to losing in 3 sets and he did not look or sound well. His nose was running. Then I saw it. The player called for his towel with the universal hand to face gesture. A ball person, a young lady from Queens College who had volunteered to assist the players at this tournament, ran the towel out from the corner. The player proceeded to blow his nose right into the towel and hand it back to the girl. Disgusted, the ballgirl held as little of the towel as possible, returning it to a hook in the corner of the court. The match continued. Not a word from the chair umpire. No acknowledgement whatsoever from the player.

This may seem like an extreme circumstance of unsanitary behavior from a barely adult touring tennis pro. However, as a supposed first-ballot member of the Ball Person Hall of Fame, I can attest that mucus is par for the course when it comes to tour players and their towels. Tennis players wipe sweat, blood and who knows what else onto their towels. At some stage in the late ’90s, something that was considered taboo in society somehow became the norm on the tennis court; expecting somebody else (ball people specifically) to carry a used towel.

Ball people used to just manage the balls. They were never asked to hand players their towels. This changed during the decade that I worked at the U.S. Open. I was in college and working one of my final U.S. Opens as a ball person. Tennis fashion was changing. The utilitarian headband and sweatbands made popular during the ’70s and ’80s had given way to more “stylish” bandannas and hats in the ’90s. These new accessories, while selling like hotcakes at the concession stand, did not get the job done in managing sweat. By the late ’90s, I observed more and more players bringing towels out on court.

At first, players would bring the towel out and hang it on the fence or throw it on the ground near the fence. They would visit the towel intermittently, when needed. Visiting the towel, whether necessary or not, became a tool to help players refocus, to take a breath and consider their plan for the next point. Though I’m sure he is not the first, Greg Rusedski is the player who comes to mind when I think of ball people being asked to run the towel from the fence to the player. I worked a U.S. Open semifinal of his and I probably ran his towel a greater distance than he ran the entire match. Of course, visiting the towel also became a ploy to throw off the rhythm of an opponent. So use of the towel gradually fell under the hawkish eyes of chair umpires concerned about pace of play. Somewhere between efficiency and expedience, the task of speeding towel usage fell to ball people.

Why not?  The player has to be ready for the next point. Ball people, who spend most of their time standing at attention, are talented enough to handle two jobs simultaneously; moving the balls around the court and delivering player towels. After all, ball people are somehow now responsible for drying wet courts, garbage disposal, serving players drinks, peeling their bananas, delivering coffee, and putting on pointless showy displays for the crowd.

With the onus on ball people, players now use the towel incessantly. The result is longer matches. When umpires enforce pace of play rules, players blame the ball people who can’t deliver fast enough. The ATP considered the pace of play aspect serious enough in 2018 to test new towel rules, forcing players to manage their own towels. However, what is missing from consideration is the matter of hygiene.

In the early days of this public health crisis (last week), a New York City tennis club sent out an email reminder that it was still open for business and that tennis already features the social distancing of a 78 foot court. Of course, it’s difficult for players to avoid holding the ball. I would be interested to see a study on how a virus fares in the felt of a ball being struck repeatedly, experiencing the abrasion of court surface and strings, while repeatedly losing and returning to shape. I’ll never forget the man who got himself banned from a tennis club for wiping his sweaty brow with the ball before each serve. He considered it a sort of legal spitball, a competitive advantage for the sweaty. His partners and opponents considered it disgusting and complained enough that club management ultimately had to send him on his way. What professional tennis players do to ball people with towels is actually more disgusting, unsanitary and despicable and it’s time the tours put a stop to it:

COVID-19 provides an opportunity to return tennis to sanitary sanity. Indeed, before they canceled the event entirely, Indian Wells banned players from giving their towels to ball people. The ball people would also wear gloves. In a global pandemic, these measures make sense. Even in normal times, players don’t know what ball people have on their hands and vice versa. Players travel all over the world and are probably more likely to be carriers of exotic pathogens than a volunteer 14 year old from Cincinnati. Hence, professional tennis should permanently adopt the rule that players handle their own towels. Put hooks at the back of the court where they can access towels quickly. Let the ball people focus on moving balls around the court and running for no reason. Pace of play will improve and so will hygiene.

Jeff Menaker

Code Violation: Poor Marketing | Poor Sportsmanship

While Gael Monfils was doing his best Federer/Nadal impression by turning back the clock to win in Rotterdam last week, 21 year old American, Reilly Opelka, won his first career ATP Tour title at the New York Open. I’ve had a chance to see the New York Open live the past two years. Following its move from Memphis to Long Island in 2018, could there be a more poorly marketed sporting event? New Yorkers were offered a rare glimpse into the post-Djokovic future of tennis and at times throughout the week it looked like there were more officials and ball runners on court than people in the stands. Talking to New York City tennis players on a daily basis, I find a majority still don’t know the event exists or that it takes place at the refurbished Nassau Coliseum. It’s a terrific venue with great potential and those unique black courts (which seemed faster this year). At least the tournament ball people remain committed to throwing the ball. The rolling of balls at tournaments everywhere has eroded the quality of ball runners (not to mention the balls themselves) while adding dead air to tennis broadcasts.

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In college tennis, #2 ranked Ohio State edged defending champion, Wake Forest, in Chicago on Monday to win the ITA Men’s Indoor National Championship and take over the #1 ranking. ITA Indoors is Division 1 college tennis’ preseason championship, the culmination of the ITA Kickoff events held across the country in January to start the spring semester tennis season. While the season-ending NCAA Tournament in May is looked on as the true national championship, ITA Indoors is a better tournament. Beginning with its fascinating draft where teams, in order of ranking, get to pick which top 15 host site they want to visit, ITA Kickoff/Indoors is comprised exclusively of the nation’s top-ranked teams. While NCAA must honor the automatic bids of each member conference champion (adding lower-ranked teams to the NCAA field), ITA Indoors is never watered down. The result is more competitive early rounds during Kickoff Weekend. The winners at the 15 Kickoff sites then join a 16th team, which hosts an indoor gathering of the 16 best, often at the height of their powers, before the season’s inevitable injuries reshape the landscape. Some “purists,” believing tennis should be played outdoors, like to dismiss the results at Indoors. However, there is no significant difference in win proportion based on indoor vs outdoor venues. The champion in February often finishes as the champion in May. With weather at recent southern host sites predictably wet in May, large portions of the NCAA tournament are played indoors anyway, including two of the last three team finals and individual finals.

College Tennis seems to have it backwards. The ITA tournament should culminate in a warm climate like Florida, Arizona, SoCal or South Texas in February and NCAAs should be played far away from the Southeast in May. California and New York are beautiful in May and far less rainy than Georgia, Florida, North Carolina or the Oklahoma tornado season. Indoor backup should always be included in the plan and officials shouldn’t be afraid to use it.

Next up, I submit for your disapproval the closing moments of an ACC women’s dual match between Clemson and Notre Dame. Did you see that? At the end of the match, the vanquished ND player goes to pick up her towel instead of directly to the net to shake her opponent’s hand. This lame move happens way too often at the end of matches. Lose the match? Turn your back and go get your towel. This obnoxious practice, seen throughout USTA junior tournaments for several years, has now made its way into the college game. Players, especially losing players, have started taking long walks to pick up their towel as a final act of disrespect for their opponent, the game, and themselves, before finally sauntering to the net for the mandatory handshake. This has to end. It is completely within USTA’s power to make it end in junior tournaments, where it starts. A simple loss of ranking points for a less than speedy handshake will quickly reestablish the norms. Kids will be running to the net to shake hands before the ball has stopped rolling. Can you imagine a pro going to retrieve their towel before shaking hands with an opponent and umpire? In the case of Notre Dame, their players seem to do it even when they win.

Of course, extenuating circumstances may prevent a player from making a beeline to the net for a handshake. We’ve seen collapsing from exhaustion, collapsing from elation, hobbled competitors barely able to stand, and in college tennis there’s storming the court on the clinching point of a dual match. That said, storming the court is getting a bit out of hand lately. I mean, c’mon people! Pretend you’ve won a match before. Really, UCLA? You’ve never beaten Grand Canyon? Obviously, major upsets, tournament wins and championships deserve the ebullience of college sport. However, the frequency of court storming is starting to cross the same line as the towel walk at the end of matches. Here’s a link featuring both infractions in the same match! Here’s a link to a more appropriate match point.

According to the USTA Code: “Shaking hands at the end of a match is an acknowledgment by the players that the match is over.” Certainly, a failure to shake hands is a code violation. A failure to do so promptly should be viewed much the same as an in-match time violation. At least the Notre Dame players got around to shaking hands. The same cannot be said for the pros in Budapest, the site of an epic breakdown in sportsmanship (and officiating) on the WTA Tour. The incident began with a Spanish doubles team failing to own up to knocking a ball over the net with a head. Tennis balls, by rule, must be struck with a racquet. Incredible that the chair umpire missed this, in a deciding tiebreaker!! It’s even more incredible that a professional would not own up to it. If not for the honor of the game itself or for your own dignity, at least realize the match is being recorded and you’re going to be forever known as a cheater. The Australian opponents, who ended up losing the match, were not impressed on court or on Instagram. Though I’m sure it has happened before, this is the first instance of publicly shaming opponents that I can recall on the pro tour. In college, public shaming over line calls is now a common affair.

Following the match in Budapest, neither Aussie was having any part of a handshake. They did choose to shake the umpire’s hand, despite his epic failure. Just another lame tournament where umpires continue to make the case for their replacement by AI, ball runners wear jeans and, you guesses it, they roll the ball. 👎

Jeff Menaker

 

Tennis Avenger

Life sure has its fair share of gut-wrenching, stop you in your tracks jolts of anguish. The death of Christian Gloria has shaken the New York tennis community to its core. For a blog that spends most of its pages pondering the future of tennis, Christian’s journey from the courts of Cunningham Park to Cardozo High School and college tennis would have been a worthy topic here any time. Today I am lamenting the loss of one of Queens’ brightest young tennis talents. Any other article about the serve +1 ball, NCAA host sites, or the finer points of Davis Cup seeding will just have to wait. Life’s rich pageant would be hollow without its dirges or its New Orleans style funeral marches to celebrate the lives we live to their ends. However, from the outpouring of shock and grief on social media, I know I am not alone in saying this tragedy seems particularly unjust. The story of Christian Gloria is one of such cosmic cruelty, it is difficult to even type the words.

Christian Gloria was the poster child of what Queens looks like in the year 2018. His face, innocent and sweet, belying an inner toughness and an edge that tennis has a remarkable way of revealing. A smiling contradiction of personas, a sweet boy, a fighter, an athlete, an artist, a joker, a dancer, a loyal friend and teammate. A kid from a loving American family, Filipino, New Yorker, searching like all kids to find himself and his place in society. When I think of Christian, I think of the mural on a Northern Blvd handball court featuring Queens’ most famous superhero, Spider-man, lifting a subway train. The mural reads: “Queens is the Future.” If Stan Lee had written his first Spider-man comic in 2018, featuring Peter Parker from Queens, Peter would look just like Christian and his great hands at the net would translate well to his role with the Avengers. Like Peter Parker, Christian experienced profound personal setbacks and grief. Just like Marvel’s most beat-upon hero, Christian demonstrated the kind of resilience tennis instills at an early age. At 20 trips around the sun, young and hopeful, he was just getting started.

I coached Christian in USTA Jr Team Tennis here in New York City and got to know him and members of his family. I had met his big sister Nikki through her work with NYJTL and the Mayor’s Cup Scholastic Tennis Tournament. Christian was in middle school at the time, playing up an age group. One of Queens’ emerging tennis talents, he was soon to join the New York tennis powerhouse at Cardozo High School in Bayside. When I first met Christian, his mother, Lelibeth, was battling cancer. I remember meeting her, a charming warm woman, an athlete, a tennis player, weary from cancer treatments and worry for the future of her son. Christian lived at the Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Florida before Lelibeth made the decision to bring him home to New York. She had become concerned with Christian’s off-court development and considered ceasing his tennis training completely. Luckily, she was able to find a happy balance and seeing him play junior team tennis was a pleasure for his coach.

Christian died Saturday morning at the age of 20 in a single car wreck in Bergen County, New Jersey at 4:30AM. 20 years old. 4:30AM. An hour and age too often associated with grievous choices and fatal consequences. There’s nothing more to say about this. I don’t need the results of an investigation to know good judgement was not on hand. For the Gloria family, and the New York tennis family, Christian’s death is a tragedy compounding the death of his mother in 2013. What makes losing Christian so astonishingly heartbreaking is that Christian’s life has been cut short in the middle of a battle which seemed to be turning his way. Christian had been a member of the ASA Junior College men’s tennis team; a strong program often associated with players who have taken the next step to play at major Division 1 college tennis programs. He was beginning a career in music, recording songs and discovering opportunities to learn about the industry. The death of his mother, when he was 14, was going to be challenging any way you slice it, but, Christian and his support system were up to the challenge.

My son is 11 and his best friend from school recently lost his mother (also breast cancer, also Filipino). The expression “that is a brutal age to lose your mother,” intoned repeatedly among members of our community, has been thrown into haunting, sharp relief. For Christian, a boy who shared his mother’s athleticism and love of tennis, I can’t help thinking back to a conversation I had with Lelibeth about Christian’s future. As we sat watching one of his tennis matches, she told me that her biggest fear facing the possibility of death was the potential impact on Christian. In nature, when it comes to sniffing out danger, mothers know best. The Lelibeth Gloria Memorial Tennis Tournament happens every fall at Cunningham Park in Queens. It just happens that this year’s event was scheduled for 9am Saturday, the morning Christian died.

My thoughts are with Christian’s sister Nikki, his brother Barry and his dad, Butch. The power above has drafted one elite mother/son mixed doubles team. A pair of Avengers are missed on Earth.

-Jeff Menaker

Onin

“This is America.” Throw the Ball!

On June 21, ahead of the 2018 US Open ballperson tryouts, the USTA made the surprise announcement that US Open ball people will no longer throw, but, rather, roll the balls from end to end of the tennis court. Having spent 11 years as a ballperson at the US Open and several other tournaments, from Madison Square Garden to Central Park, the announcement came as a bit of a shock. With a teenage daughter trying out for one of 300 coveted ballperson jobs, I took the opportunity to visit tryouts this year. Seeing old friends, talking about the announcement, taking the temperature of the veteran ballperson corps, I found folks having none of it.

The USTA and Open staff have always boasted the best ballperson crew in the world. Much of the excellence and efficiency that ATP and WTA Tour players have come to appreciate in US Open ball people stems from the ability to zip balls around the court, providing players an extra beat (and one less distraction) to focus on the next point. Having attended the first two days of qualifying at Flushing Meadows this week, the difference is stark. Even a well-managed Court 11 ballperson crew with athletic veterans and standout rookies could not hide the limitations of rolling the ball from end to end. On Court 17, the new serve clock, ticking at each end of the court, does the rolling process no favors. What’s funny about ball people rolling the balls, 1-2-3, to a middleman at the net, who then turns and rolls them the rest of the way; one is hard-pressed to imagine a less efficient, more unimpressive way of moving balls around a court. Not only does rolling wear out the balls faster and add more dirt to the felt, the process takes eons.

If you watch these things carefully, as I am conditioned to do, the most common television image between points at Wimbledon is that of a player standing, watching the ballkid pick balls off the ground, waiting for a ball to use in the next point. This happens repeatedly, even on the premiere courts. It’s no different at the French Open. It simply takes more time for players to be served when ballkids have to field rolling grounders. This has to rub the veteran ball-ninjas in Flushing the wrong way; to take such pride in their swift delivery, only to be told we’re going to conform to the European standard. Are we not living in Trump’s America?! We’re supposed to be winning, not succumbing to the French. We throw the ball 120 feet, not two 18.288 meter legs, on a roll.

Previously, the US Open was the only grand slam tennis tournament where ball people threw the ball. Video of the first US Open, 50 years ago, on grass, shows the ball people (looking pretty chill) throwing perfect strikes on one hop and then waiting for the players (Ashe and Okker), not the other way around. Quick hands, a strong and accurate arm, alert eyes, and the ability to not attract attention have always been the hallmarks of a great US Open ballperson. Like today, the ball people who swept the net of errant serves in 1968 were fleet and agile. As the 2018 main draw kicks off on Monday, the USTA has unwittingly introduced an agent of inefficiency to the flow of matches. Why?

In a statement released by the USTA, longtime Director of Ballpersons, Tina Taps, said, “By rolling between positions, we are putting less emphasis on a single skill-set, in this case throwing, and instead looking at the importance of slotting more well-rounded athletes at the positions.” This is, of course, a well-crafted piece of PR malarkey because throwing and catching is exactly why the US Open ball people have always needed to be well-rounded athletes. To be fair to Ms. Taps, she can be found all over the internet, over decades, extolling the virtues of throwing the ball and correctly pointing out the baseball skill set as key to the US Open’s (now lost) ballperson supremacy. “This is America,” she once said of throwing the ball.

While those who get a regular check from USTA are towing the line, it doesn’t take much to figure out what is going on here. USTA wants more female ball people for their showcase matches at the end of the tournament. It’s about appearances (which isn’t necessarily a terrible thing). Leave aside having the best ball people on court for the biggest matches. That’s another story, for another blog entry.

Plenty of women can wing the ball the length of a tennis court with accuracy. I’ve seen a few who can zip the ball as fast as the young men. While there have been scores of female ball people over the years, the timing of the US Open is such that many of the best ballkids have already returned to college or high school classes during the second week of the tournament. There are fewer needed, but, also fewer available during the quarters, semis and finals. The lower percentage of women and girls in the ballperson corps from day 1 means there are even fewer excellent and deserving ballgirls available for the final rounds. Instead of addressing the actual source of the problem, not carrying enough adult women who are available to work when school is in session, USTA has shown an odd sexism by assuming women are so across-the-board inferior at throwing that a change to how the ball moves around the court is needed, just to attract more girls to tryouts. I can imagine the boardroom conversation:

Executive 1: We need more female ball people on the show courts. Billie Jean King is killing us on inclusion. We need to do something.

Executive 2: I spoke to the people who run the ballpersons. They say they lose too many of their most talented kids during the second week due to school starting. They don’t have enough women who can make the throw from the back. They can only put them at the net posts.

Executive 1: Damn it! The net kids are never in the camera frame when they show the players’ faces on TV. We need girls at the back. Pretty ones, too!

Executive 3: Why do they need to throw the ball? They don’t throw the ball at Wimbledon.

Everyone: Great idea! Let’s stop throwing the ball, torpedo the reason US Open ball people are most efficient and slow down matches, just like Wimbledon!

Okay. I’m sure the last line didn’t happen. But everything up to “Great idea!” almost certainly did.

It’s a surprising decision, since the powers that be are intent on speeding up the game for millennial viewership. They’ve added the serve clock, eliminated sit-down changeovers after the first game of each set and bastardized the scoring (in doubles especially). I’ve already written about eliminating the lets on net cords. If tennis wants to speed the pace of play, eliminate ball people rolling the ball. It’s too slow. New York crowds are about to notice (and say something).

I’m a fan of progress. In a few short years, there will be no more line judges on professional courts. Ball people remain necessary and can play a role in reducing dead time in matches. Though it’s certainly better than rolling, throwing the ball is not the only efficient way to move balls across the court. With more players using ball people as towel stewards, it often makes sense for a ballperson to run a handful of balls from one end of the court to the other when the serve changes ends. We see this a bit at the French Open when a ballperson is too occupied with a player towel to receive rolls. Running the balls already happens at the US Open when ballperson crews are stretched thin with junior events and doubles matches in the second week. When you have one ballperson running balls to the other end between games, the balls get to the other side quickly, without much drama or risk.

Ultimately, the USTA should still seek the most well-rounded athletes in their ballperson tryouts. Just don’t pretend rolling the ball requires anything more than lowering the standards. Instead, keep the standards high, throw the balls and let those who can’t throw accurately display their athleticism by running the balls. Then, do a better job encouraging girls, especially adult women, to join the team.

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The new Louis Armstrong Stadium is absolutely incredible. In fact, it’s so beautiful the USTA will eventually have to demolish Arthur Ashe Stadium to build something architecturally worthy of Armstrong next door.

It has been brought to my attention that I didn’t cover the Australian Open ball people. They also roll the ball and wear funny hats. I had a good joke about rolling wombats, but, it didn’t make the final cut.  Follow me on Twitter: @Jeff_Menaker

 

– Jeffrey Menaker

If the ball is in your court, play it!

“Innovation is not born from the dream; innovation is born from the struggle.” This quote from author Simon Sinek is the perfect description for how the ugly side of college tennis prompted one of the sport’s overdue innovations.

Several years ago, Division 1 College Tennis had a cheating problem. Not the line call cheating you’re thinking about. That we still have. The issue derived from the speed of serves in men’s college tennis and the reliance on serving to win quick points. As players were finding themselves being aced with frequency, some discovered a nasty little reprieve from hearing the ball go whizzing past. Just as players are left to call their own lines in college tennis, with roving umpires or chair umpires employed to rein in malicious line calls, players are also left to call service lets. So, a growing number of players, finding themselves aced, would call “let” to indicate the ball had just skimmed the edge of the net cord, warranting a do-over.

For those who don’t know a let from a set, when a ball is served to start a point, if it hits the top of the net, but, still lands in the intended service box, the server gets another chance to serve. Whether a ball clipping the net gives an advantage to the server or to the returner is moot. Tennis was once called a “gentleman’s game,” where competitors played with respect for their opponent, respect for themselves and respect for the sport. Naturally, anything deemed to provide an unfair advantage, like a ball striking the net cord accidentally from the start, would have been instantly eliminated by the beneficiary with a “let” or do-over granted. It’s so British, right? Can you imagine a sport developed in the U.S. where the players call a do-over (without an unleashed dog in sight) and continue in good faith?

Good faith is not the signature of college tennis, so as returners discovered a cheating let call to be an employable tactic, the powers that be were forced to address the matter. One difficulty in solving the issue was that roving officials and chair umpires, already in poor position to overrule malicious line calls, could not be expected to rein in phantom service lets. There are always balls that clearly strike the top of the net. However, it’s incredibly difficult to know when a ball has just skimmed the net. Men’s serves can range from 100-130 MPH. University of Georgia great, John Isner, holds the ATP’s official record for the fastest serve at 253 km/h (157.2 mph). The person with the best view of whether a ball has touched the net is actually the returner, who can see a ball changing direction as it approaches. In professional tennis, a sensor on the net indicates a net cord touch by alerting the chair umpire.

Since putting sensors on every college court or asking roving officials to determine whether a ball has skimmed the net is simply unfeasible, the solution was to eliminate let calls on net cord strikes altogether. Play the let! This was for NCAA Division 1 men’s tennis only. Apparently, the women don’t serve fast enough and the men in the other divisions haven’t figured out how to cheat yet.

Playing the net cord is not unique to college tennis. The no-let rule is in place in World Team Tennis, the summer league started by Billie Jean King, who said eliminating lets “just makes for more drama.” Drama is nice, but, speeding up the game has been a priority for tennis at all levels. Though I doubt there is a material shortening of men’s matches, I think it would speed up women’s tennis to play without the interruption of service lets. Here’s a video of Serena Williams trying to get a point started. Women seem to experience more net cords on serve than men. Perhaps that’s because women are shorter on average. Serving from a lower point of contact (and a lower angle) reduces the area the ball has to enter the service box while still clearing the net.

Because they are aiming at a tighter window, there is less space for shorter servers to avoid the net. Eliminating the lets could have a discernible impact on speeding up women’s tennis.

Here’s hoping that playing the net cord on serves is expanded to all of tennis. Any other shot that hits the net cord and goes over is played in good faith. Why should serves be any different? Volleyball plays the ball off the net at all times. Real tennis, or royal tennis, our sport’s precursor, didn’t have any service lets.

It’s not easy to determine who benefits more from net cord serves. As long as net tension is properly maintained, serves that strike the net cord and trickle over are rare. The possibility of a short bounce off the net may force returners to move forward, reducing their reaction time to take full swings at other serves. Thus, you’d think servers gain a bit of an advantage. Yet, watching a returner put away a high bounce off the net, servers might miss the opportunity to take another. Net cords are like a box of chocolates…

The ATP has already tested no-let tennis on the Challenger Tour and at the Next Gen ATP Finals in Milan last year. ATP Executive Chairman, Chris Kermode, clearly has it on the fast track. The WTA should follow suit. Since college tennis is leading the way on this, it would be great to see all of college tennis playing no-let in 2019!

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Several readers have contacted me regarding pace of play efforts mentioned in my previous post. One interesting suggestion was that with so many gambling opportunities on so many tennis matches, every day, all around the world, there is a push to make tennis more random for online gambling. Whether this is a fair assessment or not, it does make my argument for one-ad scoring over no-ad scoring seem downright noble. With gambling on NCAA sports now becoming legal in many states, sudden death points and the line call cheating we see on deuce will come into sharper relief. Right on cue, The New York Times has an article on the value of game data in sports betting. It’s an interesting wrinkle, since some historians believe the scoring of real tennis (which we use for lawn tennis) evolved as a way to provide wagering and side bets in the royal courts of Europe. Note to gamblers: According to Alison Weir in Henry VIII: The King and His Court, Anne Boleyn was arrested while watching a real tennis match. Had she bet against Henry? According to Weir: “By all accounts, even allowing for a degree of sycophantic flattery, [Henry] was a world-class [tennis] player.”

Also in my previous post, I mentioned this portable line call device as an option for getting line calls right in college tennis. As the ATP prepares to use live Hawk-Eye to automatically alert if a shot is in or out, in real time, without challenges, without the dramatic wait and without line judges, we are coming to an inflection point in how professional tennis is conducted and perceived. Let’s hope there is trickle down to how children develop in the game. Imagine a sport that doesn’t send sensible parents running the other direction, hands covering children’s eyes from the sight of cheating kids and unhinged parents. Well, there will always be unhinged parents, but, not over line calls. The live Hawk Eye revolution should increase demand for portable line calling devices like In/Out. For those who run junior tournaments, the AI future can’t come soon enough.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jeff_Menaker

Back to Deuce!

With the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Tennis Championships a month in the rearview mirror, and the incoming freshmen due on campus before you know it, now is as good a time as any to look back at “May Madness” and take stock of what college tennis has going for it and where the experience could improve for players and fans.

Dual Matches Are Faster 

At the time Division 1 college tennis was moving to no-ad scoring, one of my arguments against no-ad was that it didn’t speed up matches that much. The eventual loser occasionally wins a game on a sudden-death point and extends the match. Of course, the primary benefit to no-ad scoring is eliminating absurdly long games of “back to deuce.” Attend a Division III match played with regular ad scoring and the difference is stark.

While new time-saving measures like eliminating warm-up between opponents and limiting the break after doubles are more effective at shortening dual matches (and quantifiable), count me among the convinced that no-ad has contributed to faster matches. As a result of all efforts, we’ve seen Division 1 tennis fit itself nicely into a 2-3 hour television window. Strangely, college tennis’ premiere event, the NCAA Team Tournament, is nowhere to be found on television…

Last year it seemed we were onto something when ESPN carried the NCAA men’s and women’s team finals through rain delays in Athens, GA. We had McEnroes in the booth. We had live scoring, stats, and features on the host school. This year there was a live scoring website and separate live-streams of individual courts (some of the feeds glitching). If the goal is to raise the profile of college tennis, zero TV coverage of NCAAs is not moving in the right direction. With six College Match Day events broadcast on Tennis Channel from one location, the USTA National Campus in Florida, it feels more like we’re raising the profile of teams in Florida. If we’ve cut doubles to one set and changed the scoring to fit television, how about three College Match Days from each of six regions: Florida, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta. That’s a season of coast-to-coast coverage.

What Have We Sacrificed? 

Notwithstanding the overall benefit to speeding things up, there are unintended consequences of no-ad scoring: cheating. To quote a friend in the coaching business, “No-ad scoring is the cheater’s paradise.”

Having coached or been a spectator at dozens of college matches over the last few years, the majority of questionable line calls from players happen on deuce/deciding point. The most shared moment of the 2018 NCAA Men’s Singles Tournament on Twitter was the public shaming of a player for an unfortunate line call in the quarterfinals. Was it a deuce point? You betcha!

The video that went viral, posted by the aggrieved team, has since been removed.

Can We Do Better? 

Line call cheating is the one area where college hoops and football can actually look at another sport and say, “Wow, clean up your act.” College Tennis has tried for years to cut down cheating, employing chair umpires to make rulings on impossible angles across 40 feet or more. We seem to be at a point where everyone begrudgingly accepts the overrule penalty system as a deterrent. But what happens when the deterrent isn’t enough? What happens when the quality of the umpires is uneven from court to court? It only takes two overzealous decisions from an umpire for there to be severe implications later in a match. An umpire on a single court can decide the overall result of a close dual match by effectively defaulting a player for a third or fourth overrule late in a match. This is as ugly a way for a sporting event to end as I’ve witnessed and yet we set ourselves up for it on a regular basis. Fair-play line calling system has been advanced as an alternative, but, perhaps seems too idealistic for some to try. Personally, I put my faith in artificial intelligence and have high hopes for this device: inout.tennis/en/index.htm

Paying for six pairs of these cameras would eliminate some of the costs of paying officials over several seasons (roving judges would still be needed to enforce other rules). Anything that reduces the cost of hosting a match is certainly a good thing when you have non-revenue Olympic sports like tennis being cut from athletics programs.

Another Option 

One way to cut down on the cheating line calls we see at deuce is to replace no-ad with one-ad scoring. One-ad provides one more chance at deuce to win the game by two and avoid playing a sudden-death point. It still prevents the never ending deuce game. The cheating that plagues sudden-death points is curtailed with a drop in opportunity.

Though hold-of-serve metrics are different from player to player, the advantage a returner has with a single sudden-death point is slimmed when they have to win two out of three from deuce. Making service breaks more difficult may actually speed up matches as better players will earn their breaks and possibly close out matches faster. Sometimes, playing two extra points can help avoid playing two extra games. The time increase from no-ad to one-ad would need to be studied, but, I’m willing to bet that any increase would be minimal and offset by recent efforts to speed the game.

Why Are College Tennis Fans So Disrespected? 

Leaving aside the lack of television exposure, the NCAA has a habit of leaving its tennis fans out in the rain, literally. The acrobatics the NCAA will put itself through not to move matches indoors, when nature is screaming “no tennis today,” leaves fans waiting hours for decisions to be made and frustrated at the lack of communication. From rain soaked Athens in 2017 to rain-soaked Winston-Salem in 2018, even Tulsa was rain-soaked with tornado warnings in 2016. With plans to hold the NCAA Tournaments in Lake Nona, FL two of the next three years, pack your umbrellas! That 4pm daily thunderstorm will be a killer with just six indoor courts available for backup.

What’s just bizarre is the belief among some officials that tennis is an outdoor sport and should be played outdoors at all costs, even if you have thousands of fans waiting and no clear window for outdoor tennis until well after dark. If tennis must be played outdoors, stop scheduling the tournament in the South in May. Every year we see one of the team finals or individual finals played indoors. If this is so distasteful, schedule the event at USC or Claremont or Arizona every year. Otherwise, the second it starts raining, have your operation ready indoors and start the matches on time.

Every major tennis tournament has come to the realization that indoor tennis is a must when conditions demand it. There are fans there to see a match. There is television coverage that requires an event. The “purists” who believe the sport is meant to be played outdoors should be reminded that the game derives from an indoor sport. Playing indoors removes two conditions, wind and sun, for both players. You can’t tell me the presence of wind or sun should be the determining factor in a tennis match.

The University of Georgia, whose tennis fans call it the spiritual home of college tennis, is spending at least $16 million to build a 6 court indoor facility in hopes of hosting NCAAs again after 2022. With that much concern about indoor backup, why not hold the event in a place that has better weather during May and more indoor courts than 6. The National Tennis Center in Queens has 12 indoor courts to go with the US Open tournament courts, ample seating (which was a complaint among spectators at Winston-Salem) and more practice courts than most schools have courts. Weather in New York is always drier than the South in May. More hotels, less driving, better restaurants, 3 airports, more local alumni. NCAAs should be held at Flushing Meadows as often as possible.

Full disclosure: I’m a New Yorker and appreciate the work being put into improving the US Open facility. Still, NCAAs should be held at sites that have nice weather in May with sufficient indoor backup. Here’s hoping Illinois 2022 will lead the way, assuming we survive the tornadoes in Stillwater 2020.