Tradition May Have
to Take Back Seat
By Rod Heckelman
At the upcoming Racquet and Paddle
Conference in Orlando, January 23, the emphasis will be on presenting
the many new available racquet sports. If you don't think these
new sports have a chance to compete with the game of tennis,
think again. Normally change is not well received and can be
challenging, but if the change is practical, it will take place.
In many cases, and for many people, moving from tennis to another
racket sport will be very practical. This means that for us to
continue to grow the game in a world a diversification, we may
have to swallow our pride and discard some of our traditional
tennis ways and replace them with new ideas and venues. To do
this, let's start by understanding why these other racket sports
are growing.
The obvious is two-fold. Many
new racket sports are easier to learn, they also have shorter
formats. The "easier to learn," issue may be addressed
in tennis by the implementation of soft balls and less court
usage, much like 10 & Under Tennis, short of that, tennis
is a challenging sport with a long learning curve. In fact, it's
that very nature of the sport that is so attractive and contributes
to the addiction tennis enthusiast acquire.
The idea of a short format is
another story, a story that may have already been in the works,
but not quite part of our industry. In recent years tournaments
have been using new formats, scoring has been abbreviated, events
and activities are more consolidated into only a few days…in
general, the tennis world is morphing into using shorter formats.
The tradition of playing tennis with attrition being part of
the equation, has taking a back seat to accommodating the mindset
of people whose live styles are more hectic and demanding of
their time. The bottom line, the general tennis participants,
especially the younger crowd, just don't have that much leisure
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The networks that broadcast may
love these short formats, but this is a hard sell to the true
tennis diehard. The idea of getting the ultimate workout through
an enduring match, has always seemed to be aligned with finding
out who is the real superior player that day. In fact, the trend
with selling or booking court time expanded in the 60's and 70's
from the normal one-hour play time to either an hour and fifteen
minutes or an hour and a half. People wanted that long warm-up
and plenty of time to try to squeeze in two, possibly three sets.
Then the changes came, starting with the tiebreakers, pro sets
of 8, and then no-ad scoring. This was very helpful for those
running and organizing tournaments, you could now come closer
to running a program or tournament on schedule. Even more lately
is the addition of a 4-game set. Again, great for T.V., but doesn't
seem to have taken a foothold with most club players.
What also disappeared with these
short formats was the social venue. Hanging around waiting for
a court to open, or just playing for a longer time with your
friends provided a perfect couple of hours to talk about current
events or other interest. But the tradition of these longer formats
is in dispute with many organizers, especially those involved
with league play. There are those who are being overwhelmed with
the commitment of league schedules that can take up a major amount
of time, not to mention a major amount of wear and tear on a
player's body. |
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For a touring player, it's not
uncommon for them to play 60 to 80 rigorous matches in a year.
In fact, the better you are, the more matches you are likely
to play as you progress further into the draw. Some say this
is the main reason so many of our star players are injured or
worn out by the time the finish playing in a major. So how can
a recreational player, or the weekend warrior, take on playing
sometimes over 200 matches in a year because of the multiple
leagues that are now established? You could say that it's their
choice, but any experience organizer knows, that choice is often
driven more by the competition, ranking, rating or just trying
to keep up with the others… which may be the real the reason
for the excessive play at club level. Sadly, this excessive play
is not part of the tradition of tennis, but rather the new model
of creating income and profit for the organizers.
With all this in mind, it seems
obvious that we will have to navigate into this new frontier
with a balance of retaining some of the old, while injecting
some of the new. If we lock ourselves into maintaining our traditional
ways, we run risk of negatively impacting our industry, especially
now that there are competitive racket sports. If we go the other
way and suddenly shorten game play, we could easily alienate
many of the established players. Like so many projects, there
needs to be a balance, which means for most clubs they will base
their programming on the nature of their membership. The real
challenge will be engineering that balance and also staying on
top of these trends to continue to slightly alter the game in
an effort to answer any new demands. |
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