ATP Schedule?

[egn]

Are you satisfied with it or not? Yes or No?

My answer no, I feel the ATP Schedule does less and less to make tennis diverse. With more surfaces around today then in the 60s why do we still have a majority of tournaments played on two surfaces hard and clay. Yes there are differences in hard, but I feel there should be more grass and maybe an appearance of carpet again. Also the master series, I feel there are too many to make them all mandatory. The clay court season is too cramped, while the early hard court season is very spread out, from Australian Open to Indian Wells there is nothing then suddenly from Indian Wells straight through Wimbledon it is packed. Then the summer is probably the best part of the year, but the fall is then a bit crazy but works pretty good. Though then again I guess complaining doesn't do much but I was wondering if anyone felt the same way.

Few things I would change
- Move Indian Wells and Miami to earlier dates.
- Spread out the clay court season a bit more, maybe cut out one of the three master series or whatever they are no.
- Add some more grass, and put back the fast grass, or the decent grass from 2003 at least.
- Make another large grass tournament, why should clay courters and hard courters get all the good tournaments where grass court players suffer.
- Shorten the year overall.

 

[JankovicFan]

I did my own analysis a few weeks ago and think they did pretty well with balancing all the factors. My only suggestion was moving Dubai to the fall open week, but it would pressure Federer to make a quick trip to Basel afterward. That move would allow injecting an open week between Indian Wells and Miami, moving IW and everything back to fill in the vacated week for the US circuit. That would surely take a couple years to negotiate and get everybody adjusted. Note that there are only those two periods when temperatures are reasonable in Dubai. It would make Dubai the end of the outdoor, hard court season.

One of the scheduling goals is to reduce major traveling for the players, trying to keep tournaments in a series in the same general area. From Feb 9 through the week of April 6, a player can stay in the US. Jumping out to Dubai for the week of Feb 23 presents a challenge for Federer, as one example, to return to Alabama for the Davis Cup matches against the US team. Roddick and perhaps others will face the same challenge.

What I have read is that hard courts are favored as being more uniform and predictable. Mat or "carpet" courts are considered too fast and are unpopular. Paris remains the Taraflex tournament among the Masters aka ATP World Tour series. Three others in the 250 series are St. Petersburg and Moscow in Russia and Lyon, France. Those are the time of year when the sport moves indoors. There might be a more favored surface but which would have to be played outdoors in unfavorable weather. That could be a matter of following the seasons around the globe, but at present those tournaments and courts are in Europe and Russia for the most part.

I suspect this may become academic if some tournaments drop out for lack of adequate sponsorship in this current economy. I read that there still are a number of tournaments without major sponsor commitments for 2009. I think it was 6 tournaments. Just in the last few days PNB Paribas finally joined the list of banks in the news re financial problems. They sponsor Davis Cup, Paris Masters, and the women's Fed Cup, among other tournaments. It will be a tough period.