The Hard Truth: Why Isn't the Tennis Industry Growing?

Why isn’t tennis growing? In my mind, the answer is simple.

YOU, the coaches -- all of us, as coaches and mentors to the next generation of players -- have stopped competing and pushing yourselves. We’ve become content being average pros in an average industry. I know it seems harsh. But we all need to wake up to the truth.

I’m not here to bash the organizations forming the structural foundation and backbone of the tennis industry and pro tennis competition. The reality is that these organizations exist to work for our benefit as competitors and coaching pros. We need to be able to appropriately and assertively advance our demands and push for better industry standards.

Change starts with you

Great businesses and successful people don’t sit around playing the blame game. You can’t point fingers at a few suits and say they’re the sole reason tennis is in decline. As I said, the industry is ours. The suits are supposed to be working for us, not the other way around.

Once you start pointing fingers instead of examining how and what you’re doing as a coach, manager, professional operator, and business owner, you give up control over your future and your destiny. Success requires everyone who achieves it to understand that you dictate your own direction in your work and your life.

I’d never say we shouldn’t hold these organizations accountable. However, too many industry pros have sat around for too long, waiting for a lighting bolt from the heavens to blast us into a new and improved industry. There’s a reason why “hit by lightning” is shorthand for something exceptionally rare. We’re not going to get any bolts from the blue. We’ve got to find solutions on our own. Nobody’s listening to the complaints and nobody’s impressed with the excuses.

If tennis industry organizations really knew the answers that would grow the game, they would’ve already done so. The issues start on the first rung of the ladder. Coaches must also be accountable. Coaches need to act. We must strive to innovate and to educate. We must sustain the professional drive to grow our bases, our teams, our brands, and our businesses.

Start with these simple approaches you can put into action right away, to help find a new horizon for the tennis industry:

• Get back to competition
• Learn from other industries
• Celebrate the success of competitors as well as allies
• Embrace the entrepreneurial mindset
• Stop making excuses

The entire tennis industry, from the coach at the public courts to the global governing bodies, can make progress through these attitudes. There’s nothing proprietary to anything I’ll say here, and building a sustainable industry is far from rocket science. Startups can and will pivot to new ideas and even business models to regain market share and sustainable growth when times get tough.

Know thy client, know thyself

Tennis, like all sports, has plenty of ego. Ours looks backward as we remember how it used to be. I know many brilliant coaches who’ve lost all understanding of how to create and sell the types of programs consumers want. Without sales, there’s no revenue, no growth, no industry. Don’t think you’re too smart or experienced to learn from your consumers, or that you know them better than they know themselves.

Do you know what your clients want? Do you really know the answer to that question? Do you know how to get clients to pay you more for every hour of your time? You won’t get there by attending more continuing education classes or by paying higher dues to governing organizations. You need to ask!

We live in a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world with a million varying distractions, calling us to spend our time and money. Make sure you’re engaging with clients and prospects. You can use surveys to check in from time to time to see how you’re doing, particularly if you can anonymize the results across a large enough group. Talk to your clients and to people in your community. Collect your data and use it to make informed decisions.

Did you know that most people won't travel more than about 4 miles for ancillary health club services of any type? We didn’t either, until we surveyed our club members and crunched the numbers on their answers. A health club’s membership roster is a massive invaluable source of proprietary data. Unfortunately, most clubs simply have no idea how to tap it. It’s not as hard as it might seem from the outside, and you don’t have to do it all yourself, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

Women account for the majority of spending on and viewership of tennis globally, yet our ambassadorship of and for female teaching professionals in developed nations is, quite frankly, embarrassing. Why should we continue to follow old bureaucracies and hierarchies that keep old white men in power when the future of tennis is the most clearly female of any major sport? I’ve personally presented at many conferences where there’s only a “token” woman or two in the audience. Our love of tradition and reverence of the past has kept the wrong faces in power over a changing landscape of tennis participation, pushing our sport towards niche status and out of the minds of the people we most need to attract. I’ve urged every tennis professional to advocate for change and a new vision, to fortify the long-term viability of our competitive and teaching efforts.

Change begins at ground level

Tennis has never been North America’s most popular sport. Despite this, we rarely move with the hunger of a true underdog. Many of us react instead of acting, and few of us understand industry and economic trends well enough to know how to pivot out of our rut and push resources to the right places.

Tennis coaching organizations in the United States tend to not help matters. Most focus on generating large volumes of low-value dues payments instead of pushing for improvements in coaching quality and output. Even so, it speaks volumes when more than half of all teaching professionals in the U.S. won’t even bother to join one of the country’s two largest organizations.

Americans’ interest and participation in peaked in 1974, and it’s generally only gotten weaker ever since. Why are so many people only becoming concerned now? If our industry was a publicly traded company, everyone would have been fired by the shareholders decades ago.

But although tennis isn’t really like Apple or Walmart, we’re nonetheless all shareholders in the industry, and our investment of time, energy, money, and effort isn’t going to grow over time if the industry continues to shrink.

As things get worse, we’ve often panicked and tried to throw things at the wall until something sticks, without having the data or understanding necessary to know where, how, and when to throw our solutions to stick fast the first time.

All businesses have ups and downs, but tennis coaches need to regain that hunger most of us once had, when we climbed the competitive ranks of junior, college, and professional tennis. Competition should be in our blood. So why aren’t we fighting harder against the industry’s decline the way we once fought on its courts?

Tennis needs ambassadors. YOU are the best ambassador. Be proud, excited, and engaged with your work as a coach. Get out there and sell our great sport, your great programs and facilities, and tell the world why we matter. Tennis can add ten years to your life. Most sports can only take years away.

Dialing for dollars

Coaches are compelled to teach “High Performance” like it’s the highest achievement, despite a lack of accreditation and education that might put authority behind that achievement. Even though those coaches monetizing High Performance tennis remain outliers, nobody has pushed for an attitude adjustment.

I know many excellent teaching professionals who’ll only sit and wait for business to come to them, out of a sense of arrogance about their abilities. With High Performance, you’re already dealing with the 1%. As we’ve seen elsewhere in life, when we only pay attention to that uppermost slice of the populace, the other 99% can fall behind or drop off altogether.

Every committed coach is undoubtedly electrified when they can claim a rare courtside vantage point at a major. If we took our blinkers off and paid attention to other sports stealing interest and participation away from ours, we’d soon recognize that true power lies in massive grassroots action.

Don’t sit in your club and wait for clients to come to you. Nobody’s above a sales call. Even CEOs of billion-dollar businesses will get on the line with a big lead and get them to sign on the dotted line. Hit the pavement on your lunch hour and visit other local businesses. Strike up conversations with entrepreneurs and professionals, wherever you might meet them. Keep a refillable stack of business cards always on hand, and use them to constantly, constantly, constantly introduce yourself to people around you.

This is how communities grow. It’s how you’ll grow the “community” of clients, coaches, and leaders involved with your business. Remember, growth doesn’t start at the top. It starts at the grassroots. In our case, regrowing the grassroots of tennis might just require planting the seeds of a hungrier and more entrepreneurial mindset in coaches around the world.

Change the (business) game

We all know that tennis has a rather high financial barrier to entry, due to the space demands of each tennis court and the sport’s inbuilt tendency to poorly monetize that space, especially when compared to alternative options. Owning and operating a tennis facility simply requires too much of a capital investment to allow aspiring tennis entrepreneurs to pursue their dreams.

I’ve seen clubs that consistently made $40,000 in net income every month razed and redeveloped into a luxury hotel. I’ve seen failing clubs with no steady hand at the wheel being sold for pennies on the dollar.

The reality is that there is no definitive blueprint for running a successful tennis-focused health club. Anyone who does know the answers doesn’t want to share, and most everyone else is just living in the past without actionable data. This approach won’t work in today’s competitive market.

One of my favorite myths is that golf-focused country clubs with a tennis program are the gold standard of success. Having worked with many such clubs, I now know that they rarely, if ever, have any serious monetary goal or motivations for growing the game. These supposed country club “savants” have never gotten a money-losing club back into the black, but they’re often asked to dictate the curricula and drive change for the rest of us. Why?.

The typical club employment model doesn’t empower growth. You’re likely to start as something like an Assistant Pro, work your way up to Head Pro and ultimately Director of the program or club, and then keep working in management until you retire or drop dead.

An inconsistent promotion ladder can engender a nepotistic and top-heavy system, stuffed with family, friends, and good-old-boy cronies. This misaligned system is the main reason why coaches leave clubs and go rogue or become so disenchanted they simply leave the industry altogether.

Today, the sky is not the limit in the tennis industry. Mediocrity in our expectations and our leadership have been rewarded with silence and acceptance. Ground-level tennis professionals are neglected and ignored.

Leadership always starts at the individual level. We all know there are some environments controlled by people who’ll never change, but let’s look at the system from an outsider’s perspective.

New title, who dis?

Nobody wants to pay top dollar to be coached by an Assistant Pro. The title screams inexperience and low rank. It can even create mental roadblocks in potential clients’ minds when you’re trying to grow your club’s base and as a coaching professionals. What can we do? Change the title and you can often change the output. Surprisingly, it really can be that simple.

We don’t need to restrain young coaches and force them into professional holding patterns while they wait for their turn for career progress. A stagnant club employment model is one big reason why so many of us have burned out inside awful and restrictive hierarchies.

Give your coaches, young and old, titles that demonstrate their expertise in appropriate business areas, and as teaching professionals. Show your consumers universal quality across your whole team.

Don’t be intimidated by the growth of those who work on your team, even if you’ve got a doctorate and/or decades of experience. If you’re truly a great Director, your leadership and the growth of your staff will only reflect positively on your own integrity and commitment to the industry. There’s no place in tennis for selfish leaders.

Match point

Winning is contagious, and we could use more winning in our industry. We’ve all got to stop waiting around and start pushing for change -- beginning at the individual grassroots level -- and hold people accountable. Don’t pay dues out of a sense of obligation. Pay because you see the value that’s in it for you! 

Be the best you can be: collaborate, share in others’ professional’s success, don’t put others down, and together we can move the needle!