By RICHARD OSBORN

 

ccording to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, our most popular sport isn’t played on a diamond, a gridiron or a court. It’s played on your local lanes. That’s right: recent studies show that 53.5 million Americans break out their bowling bags on a regular basis. The alleys are awash. Somewhere Ralph Kramden is smiling.

In team sports, basketball is the be-all, end-all with 32 million players. Other team sports on the rise include lacrosse and softball. And Zidane be damned, soccer has received a boost in participation due to the strong interest generated by last year’s World Cup.

So where does tennis stand in all this? Actually, on paper, the numbers tell us that our communal mission to “grow the game” is right on target as evidenced by a spike in racket and ball sales, recreational players and fans. While other sports may boast more bodies, tennis is the only traditional sport (i.e. football, baseball, basketball) that has continually grown over the past five years — up 10.3 percent to more than 24 million players.

While all this may leave you with a warm ‘n fuzzy feeling, what these numbers don’t reveal is the quality of the athletes who are migrating toward our beloved sport. Let’s face it, these days the NBA, NFL, MLB, PGA and NHL hold acronymic dominance over the ATP and WTA. Fact is we’re losing our best athletes to other sports. Right now, in the schoolyards, an afternoon tennis match just doesn’t carry the must-see élan that goes along with a Friday-night-under-the-lights football game. Sure, there are American kids out there who aspire to be the next Andre Agassi, but there is a whole lot more who are wallpapering their rooms with the likeness of Tom Brady, Kobe Bryant or Derek Jeter.

Tim Mayotte was America’s top junior in the tennis-boom year of ‘78, the same year the U.S. had six men ranked among the world top 10. Today we have two. But Mayotte says we’ll never return to those glory days until we start wooing our most gifted athletes.

“In the rest of the world, tennis is one of the primary sports, along with soccer,” Mayotte told IT. “They’re getting the best athletes. Here, they’re playing basketball, baseball and football. Even soccer is now getting some of our best athletes. That’s really the key. You can train all you want, you can do everything right, but unless somebody’s got the goods, they’re not going to make it. You have to get the best athletes.”

Exactly how you get those potential world-beaters is open to debate. With the globalization of the game and an over-saturation of sports in the U.S. market, tennis has become a tough sell when it comes to creating a talent pipeline. The USTA is going great guns with player development super-sites in Florida and Southern California, but scan the ATP and WTA rankings and you’ll be stunned by the dearth of American names among the top 100. For every Sam Querrey or Vania King that surfaces, it seems there are tenfold from Argentina, Russia and points beyond — countries in which tennis ranks behind only soccer in popularity. And we can’t help but wonder: what if Michael Jordan had been drawn to a tennis court instead of a basketball court? What if Earl Woods had pushed his son into tennis, not golf? What if, in lieu of rushing for yardage, Reggie Bush had opted to rush the net?

“The macro question is how do you expose people to tennis?” asked former world No. 1 Jim Courier. “If you want to expose the best athletes to tennis, it has to come through the school system, because people don’t always have rackets lying around the house. A lot of our best athletes don’t come from means. How to develop the skill set of a tennis player is a very complicated conversation.”

Enter Phil Cello, formerly the director of player development for the USTA’s Southern Section and an innovative teaching pro who now oversees the Nike Junior Tour in the U.S. Based in Green Valley, Calif., Cello has spent the last 15 years documenting a disturbing trend that has seen U.S. tennis lose its once-cherished foothold. He has invested thousands of hours compiling stats that document a steady 25-year decline.

“It’s become obvious that, from a talent standpoint, we’re just getting murdered,” he said. “I honestly believe it’s the most pressing issue for the USTA. It’s absolutely scary where we’re headed.”

Cello’s numbers illustrate how our talent pool has all but evaporated. In ‘81, the combined number of U.S. men and women ranked on the tour was 389 players, versus the rest of the world at 970. By ‘06, despite all the dollars funneled into USTA player development, prize money increases and more events, there were actually fewer Americans on the charts — 276, compared with 3,050 worldwide; a slide from 30 percent to 8 percent (ouch!). And growth on the junior level has been stagnant, too. In ‘91, the USTA claimed roughly 156,000 juniors on its membership rolls. Fifteen years later, that number had increased only to 174,000. That’s 18,000 new members in a decade and a half. By contrast, France, population 60 million, has approximately 530,000 registered juniors and the Netherlands, population 16 million, has 143,000.

The trend also stretches into the college game, which has seen an unprecedented influx of foreign-born players. In ‘82, 84 percent of the top-100 NCAA Division I men and 90 percent of the top-100 Division I women hailed from the U.S. In ‘05, those figures had plummeted below 50 percent to 38 percent and 49 percent, respectively.

“This trend is not going to stop,” said Cello. “If we don’t watch out, we’ll be the next Australia.”

Once the land of Laver, Emmo, Rosewall, Newcombe, Rafter, etc., Australia now has only one man in the top 100 (Lleyton Hewitt). Argentina and Spain each have 13.

While, in the current climate, it may be unrealistic to think that U.S. tennis can compete for exposure with our marquee sports, or, for that matter, that we will ever return to the dominance we once knew in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Cello is more than confident we can curb the prevailing trend. That’s why he’s been working closely with the USTA in an effort to launch an all-out, American Idol-style talent search to help identify our most gifted athletes. Taking a lesson from Russia, China and Eastern Europe, Cello is hoping we can adopt a highly proactive, go-out-and-get-’em approach when it comes to talent acquisition. Rather than depending on big numbers and the old (dust in the wind) trickle-down effect, he says we need to go out and identify the players who show the most promise.

“I’m coming up with a program that can help change our numbers without tennis being the No. 1 most popular sport,” he said. “We have all of these facilities. What we don’t have is our best athletes going into tennis.”
Thus far his research has received positive reviews from sages like Dick Gould and Todd Martin, and he’s in conversation with USTA NorCal in regard to launching a pilot program that would utilize the talent of some of the section’s leading coaches. His system involves targeting schools and developing testing protocols, tryout formats and performance standards. If everything goes well, Cello would like to see the program spread across the country. But to do so, he’ll have to convince the pooh-bahs that his no-nonsense philosophy is on point, that success at the top of the sport will fuel growth across the board, that it’s a win-win.

 

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