College Tennis Fixing the Wrong Thing

K

Kirijax

Hall of Fame
Posted this on the Miami Hurricanes thread but I'll go ahead and post it here too. Just something I wrote/ranted about on my Canes site.Maybe a bit long but here's my two cents about one of the many problems with college tennis. The focus has all been on the rule changes but I think the higher ups are trying to fix the wrong thing.

College Tennis Changes: The Wrong Approach

During the last few years, the NCAA, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) and the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) have been making an effort to "save" college tennis. College tennis is in trouble. It needs help. Changes need to be made if it is going to survive. In the last 10 years, over 100 schools have dropped tennis from their sports programs. Attendance has been falling. College tennis generates practically zero revenue. It is a difficult sport to televise. Very few of the players actually make it in professional tennis. There is no denying that something needs to be done to save the sport on the college level.
When the announcements for the rules came out, everyone who has a voice in the tennis community made their opinion known. And the changes were almost universally derided. The changes that were put into effect were:
No warm-up before doubles.
In doubles, the games will be one-ad scoring and a tie-breaker will be played at 5-all.
No time will be given between the doubles and singles matches.
In singles, the games will be one-ad scoring and a tiebreaker at 5-all.
If the first two sets are split, then a super-tiebreak (first to 10 points wins) will be used.
Those are the basic changes the NCAA and ITA announced would be used through the ITA Indoors tournament in February. Jon Wertheim of Sports Illustrated, Colette Lewis of Zoo Tennis, Ben Rothenberg of the New York Times, and many others called the changes bad for the sport and questioned the reasoning behind it.
I won't go into all the changes in detail since the writers I listed above have done a better job of it than I ever could. And I agree with them. The changes are a horrible, poor attempt to try to save college tennis from being dropped altogether. I do agree with their goal of saving the sport. However, the tennis associations want to make tennis more accessible and shorter for the casual college sports fan. I get what they are trying to do. But they are approaching the problem from the wrong side.
Tennis is a beautiful, exciting, amazing sport. A few weeks ago, I ran a couple of articles on the "Most Difficult Sport" and the "Sport with the Best Athletes. In both discussions, tennis was solidly in the top ten for both. For those who have played tennis before, there is no denying that it is one of the most difficult and challenging sports out there, and the top tennis players in the world are some of the best athletes you will find anywhere. The sport has endured for over 100 years with very few changes compared to other sports. It is one of the few sports that is truly international. I need to jump off my soapbox now because if tennis had an anthem I'd be singing it now. It is a beautiful sport.
Tennis does not need to be changed. The rules do not need to be altered, the warm-ups do not need to be canceled, and the high intensity of a third set battle does not need to be wiped out to accommodate a few casual fans. The problem with college tennis is not the rules or the way the sport is set up. The problem is the promotion of the sport.
Let's say you're watching a football or basketball game scoreboard on ESPN's GameCast or CBS Sports' GameTracker during work or maybe when a game isn't televised. The scoreboard is updated once every 5 minutes, sometimes after a 30-minute wait, and sometimes it just freezes. How often would you keep going back to that sport to check the scores? Or how about you see the scoreboard and it has your team winning by a score of 21-6 and then suddenly the scores are flipped and you find out that your team is not wining but losing. How long will you trust that scoreboard? How long would you enjoy following a sport like that?
We all want accurate, up-to-date, detailed scoreboards to follow our favorite teams. As an expatriate American living overseas, sometimes that is all I have to follow my favorite sports. College tennis has utterly and completely failed in this area. All of the instances that I mentioned above are regular occurrences in college tennis. I cannot count the times I have woken up at 2 am in the morning to follow Hurricanes tennis (yes, I'm nuts but that's another discussion for another day) and I have sat for hours, waiting for the scoreboards to be updated before finally rubbing my bloodshot eyes and giving up. There are even tennis venues where the fans who are actually at the matches do not know what the scores are because of the poor effort of keeping them updated or the scores mistakenly punched in by an umpire or the hard-to-see scoreboards. It's enough to make you cuss like the most foul-mouthed sailor.
This is just one example of the poor job college tennis does at promoting its sport. ITA had a page of links to three dual matches last weekend, but there were over a dozen dual matches going on around the country. College Tennis Online had the wrong date listed for the latest Canes tennis match. Over on a tennis forum called Talk Tennis, there are a few huge, crazier-than-me, die-hard tennis fans who do their best to list all of the live stats links for the dual matches and these lists are much more thorough and complete than anything the ITA puts out and that is just sad. If the tennis fanatics like myself and the other fans on Talk Tennis have this much trouble following the matches, how many casual tennis fans are going to do the same? That's right. None.
The answer to saving college tennis is not in changing the rules. No one is going to suggest that baseball be cut back to six innings, for football to be played for three quarters, or for basketball to play for only 30 minutes. It should not be done for tennis either. The big wigs of college tennis need to sit down and talk about the problems of how the sport is being promoted; not how to change the rules to make it more "television-friendly". If the product is good, people are going to watch it. And the sport of tennis is a very good product. If the promotion is good, people will take notice and come to see what it's all about. This is where college tennis has failed and no amount of rule changes is going to make the fans stay. don't change the sport. Figure how to promote the sport. That's the only way tennis can survive in the world of college sports.
 
C

Clemson_tennis

Legend
My brother worked the Clemson vs NC State women's tennis match and he told me that the people keeping track of the scores were clueless about tennis. One guy apparently didn't even know that you serve crosscourt in tennis. These are the people running the scoreboards across the country. Interns that have a mild interest in sports and decided they want a career out of it and since they are new the SUD sticks them at the low sports like tennis and diving or whatever.
 
TopDawg

TopDawg

G.O.A.T.
I've seen the same thing before and that was my thoughts from the indoors too with the ITA folks. I guess it starts at the top and rolls down the hill.
 
K

Kirijax

Hall of Fame
How can we/they/someone fix it? there has got to be a way. who does it start with? How do we get the message out?

I've badgered the Canes sites a bit and the assistant AD got on the Twitter site for updates a couple weeks ago. Today against GT they did the best job I've ever seen them do in keeping up with the scores. It's a start. Just got to find the ADs and assistant ADs who truly care about sports, not just the big three.
 
K

Kirijax

Hall of Fame
It's pretty obvious no one has any answers to fix this. The only way is for those in charge of college athletics to set something in motion. To set up standards or procedures to keep the same mistakes and confusion from happening. However, I do not have any faith at all in the present big wigs to care what is going on in college tennis.
 
D

DaveKB

Rookie
Kirijax said:
Posted this on the Miami Hurricanes thread but I'll go ahead and post it here too. Just something I wrote/ranted about on my Canes site.Maybe a bit long but here's my two cents about one of the many problems with college tennis. The focus has all been on the rule changes but I think the higher ups are trying to fix the wrong thing.
Click to expand...


Many seem to want more coverage "stuff" not less and before the internet and live scoring folks like you and me read the college tennis results in the newspaper, if it it was even reported in the newspaper, which was rare where I live in NC. Maybe we should just go back to those days for the tennis "purests", so that we can keep things the same. You and me and many others now live and die for instantaneous and accurate live scoring and complain when it is sometimes wrong or too slow.

What we seemingly would like is more TV coverage on cable outlets or conference networks and/or quality live streaming. But the powers that be have said that this will not happen (except maybe live streaming) unless college tennis matches last roughly 3 hours.

A better comparison is not your example of shortening of FB to 3 quarters or baseball to 6 innings, but making FB 5 quarters and baseball 12 innings with both lasting 5 hours. Who is going to watch that? That is where tennis is now and IMO somewhat shorter matches are just not that big a deal and if it ever happens, folks will quickly get used to it and this mini controversy will end.

I do think that $$ are driving this tennis change thing and if a little money can be raised like this ESPN match day thing, which all seem to hate, it may help keep some college tennis programs alive. The big time tennis schools do not seem to have money problems due to FB and BB TV money, but the rest do and tennis does cost money.

I happened to watch two UVA tennis matches this past weekend vs two top 10 teams (Baylor and ND) and made a 7 hour round trip drive to do so. UVA won both by 6-1 scores and while there were some individual close matches it was hardly "exciting", because once UVA won the doubles point and many first sets in singles, it was clear UVA would win. At that point many folks left. The Baylor match was in the low 40's at noon and thankfully was moved indoors, so that the maybe 150/200 people would not freeze to death. The ND match had to be moved indoors after it started to rain after about two hours outdoors. I mention this because you pretty much have to be a tennis nut to endure the weather vagaries of college tennis.

I have suggested what I think is good compromise here before:

1) Play one ad tennis in both singles and in the doubles. Maybe 5 % of games go beyond one ad now, so it changes little, except to eliminate the 4 hour singles match that sometimes happen.

2) Eliminate warming up with your opponent before singles and between doubles and singles.

3) Limit the time break between doubles and singles to 5 minutes.

4) Limit the changeover rest periods to every other end change.

5) Eliminate on court coaching, except at the end of games.

6) If you are going to keep the men and women together at the NCAA's and insist on playing the 16's there, then something has to be done to shorten matches, so they do not finish after midnight and then have a match the next day. My suggestion is to play singles first ONLY at the NCAA's and ONLY in the 16's. The 16's are rarely competitive anyway, so get these matches out there and off the courts in an hour and half and get through the long first two day schedules by 6 PM or so. Now if the NCAA would just go to an Elite 8 format at the NCAA's or split up the men and women, this would not be necessary.
 
jaggy

jaggy

Talk Tennis Guru
A good post Dave, smiling at "eliminate on court coaching", Ty Tucker tells them how to tie their laces, Ohio State would really have a tough transition.
 
K

Kirijax

Hall of Fame
DaveKB said:
Many seem to want more coverage "stuff" not less and before the internet and live scoring folks like you and me read the college tennis results in the newspaper, if it it was even reported in the newspaper, which was rare where I live in NC. Maybe we should just go back to those days for the tennis "purests", so that we can keep things the same. You and me and many others now live and die for instantaneous and accurate live scoring and complain when it is sometimes wrong or too slow.

What we seemingly would like is more TV coverage on cable outlets or conference networks and/or quality live streaming. But the powers that be have said that this will not happen (except maybe live streaming) unless college tennis matches last roughly 3 hours.

A better comparison is not your example of shortening of FB to 3 quarters or baseball to 6 innings, but making FB 5 quarters and baseball 12 innings with both lasting 5 hours. Who is going to watch that? That is where tennis is now and IMO somewhat shorter matches are just not that big a deal and if it ever happens, folks will quickly get used to it and this mini controversy will end.

I do think that $$ are driving this tennis change thing and if a little money can be raised like this ESPN match day thing, which all seem to hate, it may help keep some college tennis programs alive. The big time tennis schools do not seem to have money problems due to FB and BB TV money, but the rest do and tennis does cost money.

I happened to watch two UVA tennis matches this past weekend vs two top 10 teams (Baylor and ND) and made a 7 hour round trip drive to do so. UVA won both by 6-1 scores and while there were some individual close matches it was hardly "exciting", because once UVA won the doubles point and many first sets in singles, it was clear UVA would win. At that point many folks left. The Baylor match was in the low 40's at noon and thankfully was moved indoors, so that the maybe 150/200 people would not freeze to death. The ND match had to be moved indoors after it started to rain after about two hours outdoors. I mention this because you pretty much have to be a tennis nut to endure the weather vagaries of college tennis.

I have suggested what I think is good compromise here before:

1) Play one ad tennis in both singles and in the doubles. Maybe 5 % of games go beyond one ad now, so it changes little, except to eliminate the 4 hour singles match that sometimes happen.

2) Eliminate warming up with your opponent before singles and between doubles and singles.

3) Limit the time break between doubles and singles to 5 minutes.

4) Limit the changeover rest periods to every other end change.

5) Eliminate on court coaching, except at the end of games.

6) If you are going to keep the men and women together at the NCAA's and insist on playing the 16's there, then something has to be done to shorten matches, so they do not finish after midnight and then have a match the next day. My suggestion is to play singles first ONLY at the NCAA's and ONLY in the 16's. The 16's are rarely competitive anyway, so get these matches out there and off the courts in an hour and half and get through the long first two day schedules by 6 PM or so. Now if the NCAA would just go to an Elite 8 format at the NCAA's or split up the men and women, this would not be necessary.
Click to expand...

I agree with you in that not all change is bad. Look at what happened with the tie break that they brought in during the 70s. It has produced some of the best tennis moments in history. Who can ever forget that 4th set tiebreak in the 1980 Wimbledon final between Borg and McEnroe? And after 50-50 all in the Isner-Mahut match I think most were screaming for the tie break to just end the misery.
But the ITA did too much too soon and their focus is on the wrong thing. I remember checking the scores in the newspaper in the morning, hours after the matches had ended. But we don't live in that world anymore. Football, baseball, basketball and any other sport has instantaneous updates with complete stats while tennis struggles to figure out who is serving next or who has the advantage in a deuce game. And there have been far too many times where the final score was "posted", only to find out that someone punched in the numbers wrong and the other team had actually won.
If college tennis is going to be relevant or even continue to exist, it has to be able to sell and promote itself as well as the other sports or schools will continue to cut the tennis from their programs because of the lack of interest.
I agree with most of your suggestions. The no-ad is not that bad but I hate the super tiebreak replacing the third set. It just changes the whole structure of the game too much.
 
C

Clemson_tennis

Legend
Kirijax said:
It's pretty obvious no one has any answers to fix this. The only way is for those in charge of college athletics to set something in motion. To set up standards or procedures to keep the same mistakes and confusion from happening. However, I do not have any faith at all in the present big wigs to care what is going on in college tennis.
Click to expand...

In terms of getting the coverage to be better we need to apply pressure to the powers that control it. Let them know that people do care. I think too many college tennis fans have just accepted that it'll be subpar. We also need to get the parents of the players to care. Certainly some parents of the international parents get frustrated at their inability to follow their son/daughter's match over in the states.
 
K

Kirijax

Hall of Fame
Clemson_tennis said:
In terms of getting the coverage to be better we need to apply pressure to the powers that control it. Let them know that people do care. I think too many college tennis fans have just accepted that it'll be subpar. We also need to get the parents of the players to care. Certainly some parents of the international parents get frustrated at their inability to follow their son/daughter's match over in the states.
Click to expand...

Completely agree. The ADs and assistant ADs need to be made aware of the problem and what the fans want. It would be really interesting to find out what can be done but also know what problems would restrict it as well. Surely every school's AD can assign one person on the staff to make sure the system is set up as well as it can be. A person who actually knows the sport and what is needed on a scoreboard and updates.
 
K

Kirijax

Hall of Fame
Just curious but what is the best online scoreboard you have seen? The standard one really needs to be changed.
 
K

Kirijax

Hall of Fame
If you think of the video feature, no contest. Stanford's is the best. Can't remember but does their scoreboard show who's serving?
 
D

dennis10is

Banned
US College tennis is dying because the liberals are giving away tennis scholarships to foreigners and illegal Mexicans.

No white, rich parents in their right leaning way will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their children's tennis just so those liberals running and ruining the schools can give away their children's tennis scholarships to illegal Mexicans or worse Eastern bloc Communists.

A creative solution to saving tennis would be to combine it with hunting and call it country club biathalon. You have one part tennis and the other hunting.

After a rousing match of tennis, the competitors would put on their riding boots and mount their horses. Illegal Mexicans caught the day before would be given a 5 minute head start and then the two teams would compete on how many illegals they could bag in a two hour period. Strict adherence to the Queen's rule naturally old chap.

Before anybody get their panties in a twist, we're using tranquilizer darts here folks. We're not killing anybody. What a waste that would be! No, these illegals will be indentured servants and will work to pay for their deportation processing fees. If they work hard, after ten years, they'll earn enough to be released back to Mexico.

Return American tennis to its roots, white, rich and righteous, and God's grace will shine on us once again. God bless American tennis and none other.
 
K

Kirijax

Hall of Fame
Miami and Georgia Tech just fought an incredible doubles point with GT first taking the No. 2 doubles 8-6. No. 1 and No. 3 both went into tiebreaks. No. 3 was tied 6-6 (I think) when No. 1 ended 16-14. Such an exciting, amazing match that the current scoreboard completely was worthless with, frozen at 7-7 with no tiebreak score until it finally showed a 8-7 after maybe a half hour or more of no change.

Such a shame. No wonder college tennis can't get the fans. Who can get interested with these scoreboards?
 
K

Kirijax

Hall of Fame
I saw that. Opinions are varied but Mark Jeffery (Louisiana) wants to make the score 21 points or whatever so it's easy to understand. No amount of rules or format changing is going to work until they get together and figure out a way to get the scores out. I don't understand why they can't see that. It's like none of them realize that there is a problem with how the product is being sold.
 
C

ClarkC

Hall of Fame
Hawaii is playing at Pepperdine right now, and at the top of the Pepperdine LiveStats page, it says "Barry University Tennis."

EDIT: And now it is back to saying Pepperdine Men's Tennis.
 
Last edited:
TopDawg

TopDawg

G.O.A.T.
Kirijax said:
The roller coaster ride of an expatriate college tennis fan. It ain't easy and can be pretty frustrating. the situation in college tennis right now is downright horrible and unacceptable. If they kept the scoreboard updates for football/basketball, there would be mass uprisings and American would cease to exist as we know it.

The Roller Coaster Ride of an Expatriate College Tennis Fan
Click to expand...

Good stuff - that time difference has to be rough.
 
C

ClarkC

Hall of Fame
I was watching the ACC women's tournament LiveStats, rooting for Virginia Tech against NCSU (no particular reason). Match at 3-3, NCSU leading 2-1 in the third set on the last match on, then NCSU leading 4-2 .... then score updates again and Virginia Tech won 6-2 in the third set. I guess NCSU got the infamous two-game penalty after leading 4-2. Classic.
 
T

Tenniaggie

New User
Kirijax said:
The roller coaster ride of an expatriate college tennis fan. It ain't easy and can be pretty frustrating. the situation in college tennis right now is downright horrible and unacceptable. If they kept the scoreboard updates for football/basketball, there would be mass uprisings and American would cease to exist as we know it.

I can relate to this post as I am the parent of a D1 player who lives on the other side of the world. My entire existence is spent getting up in the middle of the night to watch try sons teams live scoring and if really lucky, videos.
Click to expand...
 
A

andfor

Legend
Tenniaggie said:
Kirijax said:
The roller coaster ride of an expatriate college tennis fan. It ain't easy and can be pretty frustrating. the situation in college tennis right now is downright horrible and unacceptable. If they kept the scoreboard updates for football/basketball, there would be mass uprisings and American would cease to exist as we know it.

I can relate to this post as I am the parent of a D1 player who lives on the other side of the world. My entire existence is spent getting up in the middle of the night to watch try sons teams live scoring and if really lucky, videos.
Click to expand...

Welcome.

What's worse is to be the parent of a kid whose college team never has live stats. LOL. It's my lucky day to get a Facebook or Tweeted doubles update. Waiting for the text or phone call to hear the results is painful.
Click to expand...
 
S

Smiler

New User
Tenniaggie said:
Kirijax said:
The roller coaster ride of an expatriate college tennis fan. It ain't easy and can be pretty frustrating. the situation in college tennis right now is downright horrible and unacceptable. If they kept the scoreboard updates for football/basketball, there would be mass uprisings and American would cease to exist as we know it.

I can relate to this post as I am the parent of a D1 player who lives on the other side of the world. My entire existence is spent getting up in the middle of the night to watch try sons teams live scoring and if really lucky, videos.
Click to expand...

Roll on the summer when we get to see them play first hand and at a reasonable hour!
Click to expand...
 
C

Clemson_tennis

Legend
You parents of foreign players need to complain about it. I have often wondered what parents of foreign players do when they ca't follow their son or daughter while they are playing because of ineptitude. You guys need to apply pressure to let these live stats people know that there are a lot of people out there than care.
 
S

Smiler

New User
Well in my case, what's available over there is way better than the equivalent here so you won't find me complaining.
 
K

Kirijax

Hall of Fame
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The Roller Coaster Ride of an Expatriate College Tennis Fan
 
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