WHY THE USTA IS A CANCER TO TENNIS AND OUR YOUTH. By Javier Palenque

Imagine a medical system where instead of focusing on prevention, doctors obsess over elaborate waiting rooms—where the experience of sitting in them is marketed as the cure. You'd call it a scam, wouldn't you? That’s exactly what the USTA is doing to tennis in America. Instead of using its resources to get more people—especially kids—onto the court, they funnel funds into promoting the “spectacle” of the sport. They’ve created a system where more energy is spent getting people to watch tennis rather than play it. The USTA has become the cancer that’s eating away at the sport’s future and our youth’s opportunity to engage with it.

The Symptoms of a Dying Sport

Every year, the USTA rakes in millions, largely from their crown jewel, the US Open. But instead of using that revenue to make tennis more accessible and attractive to young players, they invest in overpriced events where fans sit, eat, and sip expensive drinks while watching others play. It’s as if a hospital used all its funds to decorate its lobby with chandeliers while patients in need of treatment were ignored.

They conflate the success of this expensive, exclusive event with the success of tennis. They throw out impressive financial figures and talk up the number of fans who attended the US Open, conveniently ignoring the one metric that matters: how many new players, especially kids, have picked up a racket? How many have “stayed” in the game? Spoiler alert: it’s fewer and fewer every year. Tennis is flatlining under the USTA’s leadership, while they celebrate profits like doctors boasting about how many patients visited the ER, never mind that most of them died.

The Disconnect: Long Matches in a Short-Attention World

In a world where attention spans are shrinking to TikTok and Instagram levels—where “seconds“ are all you have to capture someone’s interest—the USTA is pushing a product that asks people to sit and watch a three-hour tennis match. The absurdity of this approach is mind-boggling. It’s like a doctor prescribing a week-long treatment to a patient with only three minutes to spare.

The USTA’s marketing is entirely out of sync with today’s youth. They live in a fast-moving world where entertainment is immediate, brief, and interactive. Watching a tennis match for hours is the exact opposite of what will attract young people to the game. Yet, the USTA continues to cling to an outdated model, believing that if enough people “watch” the US Open, the sport will somehow grow.? Spoiler: It won’t.

The Cancer of Revenue-First Thinking

Here’s the kicker—the USTA doesn’t care. Like a corrupt pharmaceutical company more interested in selling high-priced drugs than curing diseases, the USTA is obsessed with revenue from the US Open and corporate partnerships. They treat tennis like a cash cow to milk, not a sport to nurture. And they have the gall to call themselves a non-profit! It’s a scam, plain and simple. The focus on profits over participation has metastasized into every aspect of their organization, slowly killing the sport.

To use a medical analogy, the USTA’s leadership is like a tumor. Instead of spreading life and health to tennis, they’re growing unchecked, sucking in all the resources for themselves and leaving the sport starved. The board, like negligent doctors, is either clueless or complicit. How else can you explain their continued support for this disastrous strategy? They’re allowing tennis to deteriorate right under their noses.

The Metric That Matters: Participation

Here’s the simple truth: the “only” metric that should matter in evaluating the USTA’s success is how many more kids are playing tennis today compared to last year. Are more courts being built? Are tennis programs flourishing in schools? Are young players staying with the sport, developing a lifelong love for the game? If the answer to these questions is “no”—and under the USTA’s leadership, it is—then it doesn’t matter how much money they’re making. They’re failing. Worse, they’re killing the sport while pretending to save it.

It’s time for accountability. The USTA needs to be treated like the harmful entity it has become. And just like we’d demand an investigation into medical malpractice, we need Attorney General Letitia James to investigate how this supposed “non-profit” is allowed to operate while lying to the public, siphoning off resources, and failing to grow tennis in any meaningful way.

Time for a Cure

The cancer has spread far enough. It’s time for the USTA to be held accountable, to stop wasting millions on lavish events that do nothing for the sport. It’s time for a focus on the health of tennis, which can only come through widespread participation, especially from kids. It’s time for a cure before the sport we love succumbs to the disease of corporate greed and incompetence.

Let’s stop the tumor before it’s too late. To do that we need to remove the cancerous cells from the body, and we need an intervention from the oncologist We need chemotherapy if we were to save the body, we just need good and intelligent people who are healthy and want to serve the game. The sport needs the tumors and dangerous cells extirpated. These cancerous cells have a nickname “ the Klan of incapables”, those who have destroyed the sport so far, while living off it, and the same ones that lie to us all the time with false participation reports.

I SAY NO TO INEPTITUDE AND YES TO GROWING THE GAME.

I can be reached at [email protected]