News & Features

by Colette Lewis, 24 January 2025

Special from Zoo Tennis

This annual exercise provides me with an opportunity to step back from my day-to-day coverage to take a bird's eye view of bigger issues and trends in junior and college tennis. Several questions similar to those from last year's edition remain open, serving as a reminder that not everything can or should be resolved in a calendar year.

Can Fort Lauderdale add juice to the Orange Bowl?

Way back in January of 2020, I first raised a now nearly annual question about the fate of the J500 Orange Bowl, one of the most prestigious and historic tournaments on the ITF Junior Circuit.

Although popular with players, coaches and fans, the Veltri Tennis Center in Plantation, Florida has not, in the USTA's eyes, generated appropriate buzz for the event, so an alternative had been sought and now has been identified, with the Orange Bowl committee throwing its support behind the Jimmy Evert Tennis Center in Fort Lauderdale's Holiday Park. The city is undertaking a major renovation of the site, which is expected to be completed this fall, and the USTA will be announcing the tournament's move there in the coming weeks, after its facilities agreement with the city is signed. This keeps the event on clay in its historic South Florida location and secures its long-time association with the Orange Bowl, which is best known for its college football bowl game.

With that commitment secured, the Orange Bowl tennis committee can now begin exploring the possibility of ATP and WTA wild cards for the champions, which may draw more attention to the ITF Junior Circuit's final tournament of the year.

Will the 2025 NCAA singles and doubles tournament be the last one held in November?

After two NCAA Division I individual championships last year, 2025 will have just one: the second of the two-year pilot program that separated them from the spring team event is scheduled for November at the USTA's National Campus in Lake Nona.

The first iteration, at Baylor's Hurd Tennis Center last November, was blessed with fantastic weather, but reviews of the move itself were mixed, with players' opinions generally positive and the coaches' opinions less enthusiastic. The play-your-way-in qualifying, rather than the use of rankings for entry, has been regarded favorably, but the loss of the traditional development time in the fall was not popular with many coaches.

A big carrot was lost when an American winner of the event was denied a US Open wild card, with the length of time between the NCAAs and the US Open an understandable objection to continuing that tradition. Many of the top college players continued the accelerating trend of taking the fall off to play professional events, which can only dilute the quality of the field.

One of the stated aims of the move was raising the profile of the event. Hopes were high that the visibility of the tournament would increase by scheduling it during a quiet time for pro tennis, but that didn't happen, with most casual tennis fans unaware it had been moved from its traditional spot after the team events in the spring. If the USTA puts marketing muscle behind its hosting of this fall's event, in a trial run for the NCAA team championships coming to its campus in the next dozen years, there is an opportunity to attract more eyeballs and spectators. But short of that, it's difficult to see what has been gained by the move.

Will the regulation of Name, Image and Likeness end the five-figure payouts in Division I tennis?

I could probably come up with eight questions on college tennis alone this year, with so many changes on the horizon in college athletics that accompany the implementation of the House settlement this year.

Whether it's Title IX, roster limits, revenue sharing or employment status, there are many more questions than answers regarding what comes next for revenue and non-revenue sports alike. But with the winding down of many of the private collectives that formed when unregulated NIL payments were allowed, it's unlikely that tennis can sustain the arms race that has developed in that realm in the past two years.

Although some top DI schools are neither willing nor able to offer financial incentives for top juniors and transfers, many are, and that has drawn top juniors who had initially skipped college tennis back into the mix. While eligibility issues can be a sticking point for these older recruits, the opportunity to play and train for free, while stashing their NIL payments for future use, is too attractive to dismiss. Given all the uncertainty still surrounding NIL, up-front payments are surely the preferred framework now.

Who is the next breakout star from Division I tennis?

You probably can't go wrong picking the two most recent NCAA singles champions, with Georgia's Dasha Vidmanova and Columbia's Michael Zheng following in the footsteps of Emma Navarro, Peyton Stearns and Ben Shelton, all of whom earned NCAA singles titles since 2021. Yet last year's top rising collegiate star was TCU's Jake Fearnley, who did not play No. 1 for the Horned Frogs in their run to the NCAA team title, and, unlike the aforementioned trio, used all his collegiate eligibility. Yet the 23-year-old from Scotland rose into the ATP Top 100 even faster than Shelton, and now is at No. 77 in the live rankings after reaching the third round of the Australian Open. Division I tennis is awash in talent, and Fearnley is more evidence of its strength as a developmental model.

Will gender equity come to the ATP and ITF Accelerator Programs?

The introduction of the ATP's two Accelerator Programs, one for Top 20 International Tennis Federation junior boys and another for the Intercollegiate Tennis Association's Top 20 men has been one of the most significant initiatives in player development this century. Unfortunately, the best college women and junior girls do not have the same opportunities, which is baffling, given the ITF's frequent declarations of support for gender equity in the sport. The WTA Tour is largely off the hook here, given that they do not oversee the W50 and W75 tournaments that are comparable to the ATP Challengers included in the men's AP, although they could certainly show their commitment to upcoming juniors and collegians by providing a wild card or two for their proliferating W125s.

But it's the ITF that needs to step up; their collegiate Accelerator is confined to the top 5 women, a mere quarter of the men's recipients. The junior girls program also is not as generous as the ATP's program for junior boys. While the top 3 girls do receive W100 wild cards, the rest of the top 10 get only five entries, compared to eight main draw challenger spots for the boys, and the girls ranked 11-20 at year-end are granted just one W50 wild card, compared to eight Challenger qualifying wild cards for the boys.

Whatever historical precedent may have led the WTA and ITF to discount the collegiate and junior development pathway is currently irrelevant, as the ATP has so presciently demonstrated. With only one teenager in the WTA Top 100 right now, addressing this inequity is long overdue.

Does the string of American junior slam champions continue?

In the past four years, juniors from the United States have claimed seven slam singles titles, winning at least one each year and one at every venue in that four-year stretch. 2024 featured just one, Kaylan Bigun's title at Roland Garros, but five Americans won junior slam doubles titles, led by Tyra Grant and Iva Jovic's two. With the United States sweeping the ITF 16-and-under Junior Davis Cup and Billie Jean King Cup titles last year, prospects for continued success at slams appear bright.

Who will steer the USTA's expansive new department?

Last October, the USTA announced a major reorganization, creating a position that oversees Player Development, the Pro Circuit, Team Events, and Collegiate and Junior Competition. Accompanying that announcement was the news that Martin Blackman, General Manager of Player Development, would be departing after a decade serving in that role.

The job of combining departments that had previously been managed in separate hierarchies is a daunting one, with the ideal candidate well versed in all levels of pro tennis, college tennis, junior tennis and player development. A key skill the czar of American tennis will need is the ability to communicate to the USTA board and CEO Lew Sherr what contributions these separate departments make to the well-being of the sport in the United States and to fund the combined effort appropriately. With the recent departures of Head of Coaching Ola Malmqvist and Blackman, the federation has lost a massive store of institutional knowledge; replacing that is yet another challenge the new hire will face.

Does the United States add another ITF J500 tournament?

Although unlikely to happen this year, three of the ITF J300s in North America are hoping to be chosen for the upgrade: Indian Wells. California in March, College Park, Maryland in August and Repentigny, Quebec the week before the US Open Junior Championships. With seven J500 tournaments total—one each in Brazil, Egypt, Japan, Mexico and the US and two in Europe—there is a case to be made for adding a hard court J500 in the US. Six of the seven J500s are currently played on clay, an imbalance that isn't appropriate given the two hard court junior slams. Hosting a J500 is a bigger financial commitment than a J300, primarily due to the recommendation that matches be chaired from the round of 32, so the ITF should be pleased to have multiple tournaments willing to increase their costs in exchange for the prestige of hosting a J500.

Leave a Comment

About Colette Lewis

Colette Lewis has covered topflight U.S. and international junior events as a freelance journalist for over a decade. Her work has appeared in Tennis magazine, the Tennis Championships magazine and the US Open program. Lewis is active on Twitter, and she writes a weekly column right here at TennisRecruiting.net. She was named Junior Tennis Champion for 2016 by Tennis Industry Magazine.

Lewis, based out of Kalamazoo, Michigan, has seen every National Championship final played since 1977, and her work on the tournament's ustaboys.com website led her to establish ZooTennis, where she comments on junior and college tennis daily.