Social Tennis in Australia — is it a myth?

Tennis in Australia is currently broken down into two areas:

• Grass Roots Tennis; and
• Professional Development

To understand the current landscape of Tennis in Australia it is important to breakdown these two areas.

Grass Roots Tennis

This area is focussed on introducing juniors to tennis and developing their abilities via various strategies from coaching drills, reduced court sizes and different types of balls. This is the perfect program and strategy to introduce youngsters to the game. This program prepares juniors to learn, develop, enhance and transition to competitive tennis.

Professional Development

Following on from the Grass Roots Tennis, the next area focuses on producing future world class professionals with the ultimate aim of producing the next world Number 1. As you can imagine, this area is competitive and the Grass Roots Player is against the odds of becoming a successful professional.

With this in mind, you might be asking what happens to those who enjoy the sport and love the game but don’t pursue a career in it?

GREAT QUESTION!

Currently, if you follow this path you would see a pathway with a massive gap between the Grass Roots Player and the Professional Player.

This gap is the Social Player.

Currently this ‘market’ is under-serviced and almost ignored!

The key reasons for this are:

• Tennis is an individual sport which makes it difficult to meet and socialise with people
• It is hard to find a court

Currently if you want to find a court, coach and player you have to visit a number of websites and apps which increase the barrier to entry!

Taking this into consideration, it is crucial that there is a user-friendly solution and brand solely focussed on social tennis. The brand should focus on:

• Retaining players (from 15 years old) who still love the game but don’t want to pursue a career in it; and
• Reintroducing adult players to the game after some time away; and

Introducing adults to the game who didn’t take up the sport during their junior days.

The last point is important as we all know tennis is a game you can play for life (in comparison to contact sports). This means there will be many people older than 15 who want to learn and play the sport for the first time. But currently this is viewed as ‘too hard’ to focus on and not worth the time.

Contrary to this current view, we think it IS IMPORTANT and IS WORTH focussing on, and for this reason we have a platform to provide this opportunity!

Your Tennis Mate (“YTM”) has been designed as a social brand to provide this platform and to bridge the current gap.

So, is Social Tennis in Australia — a myth? Currently, yes. But YTM’s mission is to stop this from being a myth.

YTM is creating a thriving tennis community and allows players to easily find courts, coaches and other likeminded players. YTM acts as the link between court owners, coaches and players — which ultimately makes tennis accessible!

Are you interested in playing tennis and meeting new people? Let me know!

I would love to hear your thoughts on this analysis and if you want to join the thriving YTM community, message us on Facebook or Instagram for the secret link.

Facebook: Your Tennis Mate
Instagram: @yourtennismate

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-CVDB