Tennis adapting to worldwide challenge of player retention

Karthi Gnanasegaram, host of the 2021 ITF World Participation Conference, shares her take-away messages from this week's three-day virtual event

I had the pleasure of being asked to host the ITF World Participation Conference this year and I found it a fascinating three days and definitely learnt an awful lot from it. 

The theme of the conference was ‘innovating to drive participation in sport’ and it was great to see the ITF embrace technology by holding a virtual event. We heard from 32 speakers from many different regions and the questions that came through showed that people were very engaged and wanted to know more about the areas we were discussing.  

I thought the two key-note speakers, Martina Hingis and Judy Murray, were both excellent and I was particularly pleased they were both female. In fact, this was an area that everybody seemed to mention that needs more proactivity – to get more female coaches, more female deliverers, and more female leaders, which will hopefully have a knock-on effect for getting young girls involved.  

It’s just a shame that’s the same conversation we’ve been having since I was little. I was the only girl along with my sisters playing tennis at our club once I’d hit my teenage years and that doesn’t seem to have improved much. Hopefully, with the work that people like Judy Murray are doing, things will start to change.  

I also think that organisations around the world have really tried to use what’s happened over the last 18 months, which has been very challenging, in a positive way in tennis. It has obviously been one of the sports that has had the advantage of being socially distanced and that means it really has come out of the pandemic with better numbers. I think, in the UK at least, we have found that a lot of people play tennis, but they don’t necessarily play all the time. And the last year has shown that people can take it up again. It’s just whether they stay in it. That topic of retention is clearly something that everyone is looking at. 

It was great to hear about the imminent arrival of the World Tennis Number in the UK – that’s definitely something that would have helped me when I was playing, being able to find people of the same standard. It reminded me of the golf handicap – obviously they are not the same – but you can play golf with people of different abilities and genders and that makes a huge difference.  

One of the issues in tennis has always been finding people in the same area that are of the same ability that you can have a good hit with, and World Tennis Number will play a big part in helping with that.  

Judy Murray spoke about some amazing tennis courts that she had seen in Grand Central Station that were set up more like golf driving range bays. You hit a ball against a PVC wall, which funnelled the ball into a machine and fired it back at you. It sounded quite futuristic to me, but it’s something you can just go and do in your lunch hour, which is a great idea. 

She also spoke about reaction walls where you can have a go at trying to improve your game by hitting lights. I know some of these things can be expensive, but I think anything like that is fantastic for getting people involved. A lot of people don’t like competition, so if you can make it more fun, then people might try it.  

The fact that the conference was a global event meant it was really interesting to hear from places like Kazakhstan, Uganda and Guatemala. I thought we’d be finding out how different it was and actually I learnt that it’s not as different as you might think, although there are clearly different demographics.  

In Uganda they were saying 80 per cent of the population is under the age of 30. Then in America, they were talking about half-a-million College athletes, which is a huge number of people who are clearly quite active.  

But just hearing about the different ideas that they had to get people involved, things like Baby Tennis and Rita Grande’s presentation about Kinder Joy of Moving in Italy. I really liked that idea and it sounded very similar to Judy Murray’s idea of Miss-Hits and She Rallies, which is to get children in small groups. They make their friendship groups the priority and the sport is secondary to that, but it’s a clever way to just get them involved in physical activity. 

It seemed like a lot of the different countries, wherever they were, whether it was Switzerland or South America, had the same ideas on how to do it, just with a more appropriate angle for their region.  

In France, we heard about these ball kid programmes, which I thought were fantastic. I really wanted to be a ballgirl at Wimbledon when I was younger, but you had to come from the two local schools near Wimbledon. This concept in France has kids around the country training to be ballkids and they could potentially go to one of the tennis tournaments in a different part of the world. That then gets people involved in tennis, not necessarily playing it, but thinking about going into it in a different way. I love the idea that someone who got into tennis by being a ballkid could then end up running a tournament because they’ve learned how that works by being part of that programme.  

All sports seem to be looking at each other at the moment. I think the last year means that there has been a lot more collaboration than there used to be across sport, particularly with tournaments coming back and how to have people working together in the same space and how to do that safely in the current climate. I’m not sure tennis can learn specifically from another sport. But I think everyone has to embrace esports and the rise of technology – if they aren’t already. 

The UCI were talking about two million subscribers to their virtual events and Deqa Niamkey was talking about how United World Wrestling got people involved on their phones. Everybody has a phone – it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about Uganda or South America or Australia – everybody has a phone these days, so it’s something you need to use to engage people.  

Attention spans are short. In golf, Phil Anderton from the R&A was talking about how they are looking at six-hole golf courses.  

Tennis is going to have to look at that as well, with five-set matches or very long matches where you don’t have any idea when the match will end – which is all part of the drama – but there’s also the fact that people like to know what time they will be free to do something else. As much as opinion was divided with Patrick Mouratoglou’s Ultimate Tennis Showdown, it was specifically aimed at having a start time and an end time and trying out new things – not necessarily things that will transfer to the main tennis tour – but I think experimenting is a good idea. 

And that, it seems, brings us back to innovation.