eBusiness Weekly
The Covid-19 pandemic served up a silver-lining-to-a-dark-cloud opportunity for tennis to grow.
From 2019 to 2023, the percentage of the US population playing tennis at least once in the course of a year bounced up from 5,8 percent up to 7,7 percent, according to the 2024 US Tennis Participation Report.
That’s left the United States Tennis Association (USTA) game to set and announce today an even loftier goal to match: to have 10 percent of the US population playing tennis by the year 2035 to make the US the number one tennis-playing nation in the world. Such an increase could help tennis take an even bigger slice into what’s been a growing physical inactivity epidemic in the US.
Now, you may say ITF and point out that an International Tennis Federation (ITF) report showed that the US already had the second most tennis players in the world in 2019 just behind China.
However, the sheer number of tennis players in the US then was largely due to how large the overall US population has been.
The sport has since grown in the US, and this new goal of the USTA is different and “sufficiently audacious” in the words of Lew Sherr, the USTA’s Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director.
“Rather than simply having the most tennis players in the world, what we want to do is become the most popular tennis playing nation in the world,” Sherr elaborated.
“That would mean 10 percent of the public participates in tennis, which would take us to about 35 million players. Our projection is to accomplish this by 2035.” The USTA chose this number by looking at other countries’ current tennis participation rates and determining what it would take for the U.S. to surpass all of them.
This goal is “sufficiently audacious” because the U.S. can’t expect the same growth rates that have occurred in recent years to hold for the next decade without doing more.
The biggest jumps in tennis participation occurred in 2020 (from 5.8 percent in 2019 to 7.1 percent), 2021 (from 7.1 percent to 7.4 percent) and 2022 (from 7.4 percent to 7.7 percent). As you recall, something was a little bit different in the year 2020, and it rhymed with the words “start of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Back then, tennis was on the short list of ways to get a lot of exercise and socialising done while staying at least one Ryan Gosling (since Gosling is around six feet tall) apart from each other, assuming that no tackling over a disputed line call was involved.
As Covid-19 restrictions eased in 2022 and more and more people forgot (or maybe ignored) that the virus was (and is) still spreading, people had more options for physical activity again.
So, it’s not surprising that the growth in tennis players slowed with a much smaller 23,6 to 23,8 million player gain from 2022 to 2023.
That doesn’t mean that tennis has lost the social and health advantages that it brings over many other types of physical activity.
People of practically all ages can play tennis, whereas you won’t see quite as many people in their 80s, for example, playing tackle football, skateboarding, or running the 110 meter hurdles.
Additionally, as I’ve covered for Forbes previously, a study found that tennis players on average lived 9,7 years longer than those who had remained sedentary, significantly more than any other sport evaluated.
And on March 27 in an event with the Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff and reps from the White House, it was announced that the USTA will be the first sports National Governing Body to partner with the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition.
To reach the 10% participation goal, Sherr doesn’t think that the USTA needs to focus as heavily as it has in the past on increasing awareness of what the USTA has called the healthiest sport in the world.
Instead, he indicated that the focus should be on “Making sure that we can deliver better experiences to keep people in the game.” Of the people who pick up a racket and try tennis, not everyone will stick with the sport.
Tennis is not like eating avocado toast, where everyone who tries it once automatically gets hooked. It can take time to get skilled enough to really start enjoying the sport.
So, Sherr would like to see the percentage of those trying tennis who stay as tennis players to reach at least the 70 to 80 percent range.
The recent growth in tennis participation has also “created new stresses on the system like court availability and access to great coaches,” according to Sherr.
If you want to court more people to become and stay as tennis players, you’ve gotta have enough courts.
Currently, the U.S. has around 247,ooo traditional-lengthed and sized courts, which won’t be enough to accommodate 35 million or so people.
Therefore, the USTA aims to eventually have around one court for every 100 tennis players, which would amount to a total of 350,000 courts for the USTA to reach its 35 million tennis players goal by 2035.
These courts would have to be spaced out across a diverse range of communities, including underserved ones, to give enough people access to the game.
Plus, the communities would have to have the means and know-how to maintain these courts and keep them serviceable for tennis.
The USTA has already pledged $3 million to refurbish tennis courts across the US as part of the U.S.
Open Legacy Initiative. The first major output of this investment has been much improved courts at Pompey Park in Delray Beach, Florida.
At a March 20 event to unveil these refurbished Pompey Park tennis courts, 2023 US Open women’s singles champion Coco Gauff stated, “I strongly believe that tennis can continue to become a more accessible sport, and I would like to thank the USTA for continuing to commit to do so.
Investing in public parks and our youth is very important.”
There aren’t yet enough good quality coaches either to help the U.S. reach the 10% goal or even meet current player demand.
At this moment, the U.S. has around 24,000 SafePlay-approved tennis coaches, a number that the USTA hopes to push above 80,000 before 2035.
This will mean expanding existing training programs and establishing more extensive and sustainable career paths for those who want to make coaching their profession.
Yes, all of this may sound “sufficiently audacious.”
But audacity is what’s needed to reverse the current physical inactivity epidemic in the US Maps from the Centers for Disease of Control and Prevention (CDC) have shown how physical inactivity levels exceed 25 percent and even 30 percent in numerous states, which is leaving the US in an increasingly unhealthier state.
Yet, there doesn’t seem to be sufficient urgency in the US to get many more people moving much more.
So, looks like it’s going to take a much bigger racket for this to change. —forbes
