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Tennis: The State of American Tennis and the Direction of the USTA
Published: January 5, 2011
The sport has been dubbed a "country club sport" and there is certainly some truth to that. It is a tough sport to afford year in and year out for families.
Eight-time Grand Slam winner Jimmy Connors said, “Somebody is to blame. It’s a matter of who is to blame. Why don’t the kids want to go out and play tennis? They do, but we get them too late. They go through soccer, basketball and baseball and by the time they come to tennis they’re 16 and 17 years old and it is too late. We need to figure out a way to get the kids when they’re young, eight and nine years old.”
Connors is absolutely right.
The USTA has recognized an increase in tennis participation, but Connors questions the legitimacy of those numbers as he never sees anybody on public courts traveling all over the country. He believes that the game should be like it was 30 or 40 years ago, when kids and families would be lining up to get to the courts to play tennis.
What has the problem been? I certainly believe that the overall direction of the USTA has something to do with it.
Let's look back to the glory days of American tennis, when nobody questioned the talent being produced within this country's borders.
On the men's side, we saw Connors, Bill Tilden, Don Budge, Jim Courier, John McEnroe, Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras. On the women's side, we saw Chris Evert, Billie Jean King, Lindsay Davenport and certainly Martina Navratilova. These names participated in a period when tennis was a prominent American sport and pastime.
The USTA provides astronomical amounts of money, wild cards and qualifying opportunities to so...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Tennis
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