Sunday, September 19, 2010
Tennis' Global Potential
In the last class, myself, Bryan Ferrer, Brian Fisher, and Joseph Ramge discussed the global potential for tennis. Tennis as a sport is very global, as players come from all over the world and tournaments are held all over the world. Tennis can expand in the future because it is taught to children all over the world and is not a very complicated game and does not require a lot of expensive equipment, so teaching people the game is not hard, so it is up to the Association of Tennis Professionals and the Women’s Tennis Association to help set of programs to teach people how to play and to provide people with necessary equipment. By doing this, they will spread an already worldwide sport even further and help expand the game to the countries that are currently not big into the game of tennis. Nothing can necessarily be detrimental in going global for tennis because it is already an established global sport, as spreading the game could only help the ATP and WTA grow. In order to market this sport as number one in the globe, there needs to be a better established international tournament. Since tennis is an individual sport, you can not put a team together to play other countries. Every time you watch a tennis match, the person’s country is listed with their name and the Davis Cup and Fed Cup currently exist to have people join under their country and compete in matches, four of which are singles matches and one of them is a doubles match, in which the countries go head to head. The Davis Cup is established and has been going on since 1900, however the average sports fan does not know about it, yet they do probably know about the four majors for the ATP and WTA (Australian, Wimbledon, French, and U.S.). In order for tennis to be even bigger, they need to make the Davis Cup not necessarily bigger, but more accessible to everyone around the world. Everyone knows that Nadal and Federer are the best individual, but does anyone really know what country boasts the best tennis professionals?
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Great job I enjoyed the post I like how you added even more details than what we discussed in class. Thanks for being the one who posted it.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad your group is looking into tennis and included all of the information that you did. To answer your question about what country boasts the best tennis professionals, you could look at that in one of two ways--either according to the number of players ranked in the ATP (Men's) and WTA (Women's), or by looking at the key competitions--as you noted. Spain won last year's Davis Cup, but this year it is France vs. Serbia. At one time, the Davis Cup was primarily the domain of Australia and/or the U.S. But now that tennis is more global, any number of nations have the potential to win it. In the Fed Cup, the U.S. is playing Italy in the finals in Nov. In fact, I will be there for the matches and just hope that Venus and Serena Williams will be playing for the U.S. (it depends on Serena's injury). Italy is the defending champ.
ReplyDeleteI think there are several things you might look for in terms of tennis. One is that it would be interesting to compare earnings of the top 10 ranked men and the top 10 women. My guess is that it would be a lot closer than earnings of top men and women in golf. Also, I believe you would find that tennis is a much more expensive sport than you might think. Besides equipment, which could run in the 1,000s per year, lessons and travel for a talented junior would be at least $20,000 a year. Ask Katie about that:-)