Tennis Season is in Full Swing!
As we start the 2023 season we just wanted to address some of the growing pains we are experiencing as a club and as a recreational sport.
Tennis Growth as a SportDenver is the #2 city in the nation for tennis league participation and it is Colorado Tennis Association's hope to keep growing league and tournament opportunities for everyone. USTA had 24 million players in 2022 and experienced an increase of 5.9 million players from 2021. That's a 33% increase!
NJTC Growth as a ClubNJTC fielded 200 teams in 2022 and scheduled 2290 courts for teams to play. We had 620 members which was a
15% increase from 2021. NJTC is the second largest club in Colorado, and has the unique relationship with Colorado USTA in that we are the only club in the state allowed to play out of more than 2 locations, as well as assign our own courts. With so much growth as a recreational sport many more teams are being fielded both within our Club and our surrounding communities.
Flight Assignment
We, as a Club often end up in a wide mix of flights for league play from the Southwest Flight to the North flights. The league coordinators do track which teams have gone north year over year but we cannot track a team for the whole season with regards to which flights they receive. In layman's terms, for Mixed 18+, a team who went to Longmont in 2022 will (if possible) be placed in a different flight for 2023. NJTC and the league coordinators have been working with USTA Colorado to try to minimize the number of our teams who get placed in those North flights. Unfortunately, they will never be eliminated but we are trying to keep them to a minimum. We do not have any control over how many teams are in a flight or where those teams are from.
Home Match AvailabilityAvailability of home matches has become a point of concern for some teams and the league coordinators have absolutely no input on who is home or away as those are determined by CTA, based on black out dates and other factors we are not privy to. Fielding as many teams as we do makes the availability of the ATC more scarce than any of us like. Everyone wants to play at the ATC and we do our very best to ensure that the home courts played at ATC are distributed as evenly as possible, but we are sometimes at the mercy of conflicts with other programs that are also trying to use the same facility. We are all hopeful that when we get more courts these growing pains will be alleviated in the near future!!