USTA WHERE ARE THE KIDS? By Javier Palenque

In my quest to help American tennis by saying what no one says and supporting it with data here are some clear facts that need to be answered or properly ignored by the USTA. This chart shows the average age of viewership by sport that appeared in a recent article in Sports Business Journal.

Here we learn that the viewership age of people loving tennis has gone from 51 in the year 2000 to 61 in the year 2016 for men’s tennis and for women’s tennis from 58 to 53. Several conclusions are to be drawn here.

1)    The way the sport is aging is simply too fast compared to the speed of changes needed for the sport. USTA please understand changes at the core of the sport, the point system, the tournament structure etc, not changes in locations or people.

2)    10 years aging in interest means the sport has been for a long time no longer interesting for younger audiences. What are you doing about adults USTA? nothing ? The reason is that adults will have kids and they need to be engaged. They are a huge customer you ignore year after year.

3)    How much older is the audience going to get before the trend is never able to be reversed if we have not reached that point already?. In the past 20 years, it has gone to 61, years of age that number should be 35, what is your plan to accomplish that? more tennis stars? more money into player development? You realize the movement required is in the exact opposite direction right? So the logical next question is what is it that you are doing that is making this age stat be so high?

The success of the US Open has a cost, in terms of real focus in tennis at the local level. They are not the same business, yet you treat them as similar. You are MISTAKEN!. The whole audience of tennis participants has shrunk, are disengaged are old and all because of your thinking.Why is this so hard for you to comprehend and own up to?

4)    It all has a direct correlation with the grassroots efforts to grow the sport needed in each zip code in the US. The fewer the new players the older the audience. The longer you ignore growing the base the older the audience has gotten. Now how does the older audience relate to the focus of the USTA, the US Open.  It is the perfect demographic, but it is awful for growth in tennis. Simply awful. This increase of aging in the audience is the direct result of the focus of the people running the USTA. Wrong focus! All these years and you keep wasting time focusing on the wrong priorities? who directs this madness?

5)    Older tennis people means lower sales of tennis equipment and merchandise. Fewer jobs for coaches, fewer innovations, fewer resources allocated to grow the game. ( it will reach a point where it will be so expensive to try to recreate the sport that it simply will not happen. We may have already reached it.)

6)    As long as the USTA keeps focusing on a) US Open b) looking for stars and c) player development. The sport participation will continue to slowly decline reaching a point of no return. How does that strategy align with the audience age? It makes no sense whatsoever. The show of the US Open will be ok, but the sport will not. The USTA through its 1950's thinking is knowingly or unknowingly taking the sport slowly to its demise. Please do not conflate the event that is the US Open with the state of the sport. Blockbuster video was just as arrogant, just as closed, just as dumb. They are no longer around. If only they listened to discerning opposite voices? Well, they did not. Imagine how the stockholders reacted after their investment was gone?

"Well USTA we are the stockholders, the parents, the kids, the coaches, this is why the whole thing is wrong. I want you to be accountable to us and not to your millionth committee who is run by your friend of 30 years"

7)    Women’s viewership seems to have improved a little though still the age is quite advanced (55). Not much to sell to a 55-year-old audience. ( lessons, clothes, equipment?)

8)    What needs to happen is to change the way things are and that does not come from the people who have been doing it for so long. What you are doing USTA is not working, has not worked and won't work. You don’t need to believe me and are welcome to disagree with me. Simply read the data and reach your own conclusions. When you do that ask yourself these questions:

8.1) If participation is so low how can we have an audience?. imagine it 10 years from now, the age will be even older of your viewers like 67 years of age. 8.2) Manufacturers have reported last year a decline in sales of 15%. What does that tell us? Look in your town, where is the tennis shop now? What is the trend? In my town, my two neighborhood shops have closed. 8.3) When current coaches age out, what happens if there are not enough kids for the new coaches to have a sustainable business? How many coaches do you think will want to join tennis with that financial prospect? 8.4) If you really love tennis, like I do, look at real estate transactions of tennis facilities, in the north, they are being converted to warehouses or soccer, in the south, nobody wants to buy them. I have, I am speaking with actual facts here. 8.5) The USTA really needs help, this problem is upon us and they refuse to see it with the real magnitude it is. Stop defending the status quo, we need to help tennis and alone the USTA cannot see or hear the problem.

I wrote an article a few months back about this very problem, see link. (please read it)

If we understand this statistic for the audience (aging viewership), then what is the statistic for engagement? Here a few lessons can be learned from another sport, Lacrosse. In the past decade, they have doubled the participation of kids in 14U. See table below. If they can double participation why can't you? Because of how you are set up and led, that is why you can't-do anything to stop this decline.

This sport publishes yearly what I call a professional report of participation. Follow the link to see how the governing body of Lacrosse reports their participation, openly and in a transparent fashion. Clear data and usable data that tells you the state of the sport. Contrast that with the way of reporting with the beloved retrograde USTA. It dares not to publish their numbers as they are hiding the obvious. The weakness of the tennis numbers is proof of the ineptitude of management, their lack of desire to openly publish them is a testament to their retrograde thinking. Why is it so much to ask for the USTA to be open with our data? A sport like Lacrosse with only participation funding and no $320,000,000.00 grand slam event grows its base by 100% among its youth in a period of 10 seasons, while the USTA fails to show its real numbers year after year has numbers that are declining so fast they prefer to hide them, and yet the same people that gave us the present situation they still run the sport? How is this possible? It is truly bizarre for me how can a board who overseas this madness, allows such concealment and deception and poor results?. Open up USTA, show us the real state of youth tennis. We need to see the participation levels by gender, age, and zip code. The numbers will show what I see every day when I drive by parks, schools and show up at a tournament. I see so few kids in Americas's best tennis city, Miami, that even has a Masters 1000, warm weather all year long and has 2 D1 schools and a D3 school. Can you imagine what it is like where it's cold? or super expensive? USTA... we have a problem! there are simply too few kids under your watch playing tennis. Do the responsible and respectable thing to do, show us the numbers of all the kids that play tennis per zip that are registered USTA members year after year so we can judge your ability to manage the game. Don't be afraid to show them. I have a guess, the results don't look very good.

The only solution is to grow the game, and if the USTA does not lead, it cannot, does not follow, it won’t listen, and won’t get out of the way, then not only will there be no kids playing soon, there will nothing to sell to audiences age 61+ other than memberships to AARP and land plots. Why can’t people running the sport see this? The old way is the wrong way. The results we have today are the product of the old thinking and acting, and both are doing little to grow the game. I say GROW THE GAME is the only way.

I can be reached at palenquej or [email protected]