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Meeting of Tennis Leaders to Improve Attendance
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SKILLMAN, NJ - Three years ago the ITA started the ITA Attendance Race to help encourage varsity tennis coaches to raise attendance at their local home game matches and to garner recognition and extra incentive to bolster support for their varsity tennis program. Race leaders are recognized in the following categories during the first weeks of March, April, May: Total Home Attendance, Average Home Attendance, Highest Single Match Totals. The ITA considers the Attendance Race to be more than just a competition but a way that universities and colleges can create awareness and add to the excitement of college tennis. Although increasing attendance of a particular match in itself is an effort that needs to consistently be built upon, more importantly, it helps promote the value and importance of college tennis by driving the youth to enjoy collegiate tennis as a passion and goal of their own.
This past Monday, to the delight of the ITA, the lengendary Wayne Bryan, father and coach of the world's No. 1 doubles team and former Stanford tennis greats, Bob and Mike Bryan, invited 25 west coast tennis leaders to gather to discuss ways to promote attendance at college tennis matches, with the meeting taking place at the beautiful Malibu Racquet Club on Monday, October 18.
The goal of the meeting was for the industry experts to share their best ideas and to brainstorm on ways to help promote college tennis and to have college tennis help promote other areas of tennis like the Tennis Channel and the Farmers Classis/L.A. Open.
"It was a pleasure and honor [to host the meeting] for a fantastic group of tennis leaders", said Bryan. "I was just amazed at the turnout and the positive energy in that room. It was a very productive and powerful hour and a half, indeed."
"We must all pull together to fill those stands for exciting and inspirational college tennis matches", Bryan went on to say. "As I said in our meeting yesterday, our basic DNA for tennis has for far too long been the half hour private lesson and we must change that and make it a van or bus load of kids going to see a college tennis match!"a college tennis match!"
Topics of discussion included:
Wayne's promotional vision was launched during a 2009 match between USC vs. UCLA women's varsity tennis teams which was highly successful and led to interaction between the ITA and USTA Player Development staff to expand the idea into the Campus Kids Day program.
The goal of Campus Kids Day is to expose more junior players and their families to varsity college tennis. The juniors have a chance to engage in a variety of promotional activities such as fast-serve contests, raffles, exhibition matches, autograph signings, etc, in addition to serving as spectators for the feature match.
For more information, visit www.itatennis.com. |
