Prepared for Craig Tiley · USTA · September 2026
“This one you can have fun.”
A kid in the stands in Atlanta, explaining the product better than our deck does. He watches at home with his family. He came to watch his sister play.
INTENNSE Arena, Atlanta · 2026 season
A gender-balanced Professional Team Tennis League
Eight playing weeks in the middle of the summer. Switch the view to see the same season against the American sports year, or against the college calendar our players come from.
Where our players have been on the tour, and where they sit on the rating that covers everyone. The orange rule is where tennis starts paying for itself.
UTR: our players against the tour’s
Down to the wire; Sudden Death
Two Arcs that finished a point apart. Each clip picks up in the closing minutes, with the full Arc a click away.
Sudden death, level at 142
The final three minutes of Freeze v Rise, 20 June. The clock runs out with the teams tied, and the next point decides it: 143–142.
Match Center ↗One point, one minute left
The final minute of Outriders v Inferno, 25 June. It finishes 150–149, with the winner’s cheque on court.
Match Center ↗Two points that flipped the score
One from the net, one from the low camera. Each is about twenty seconds, and each one changed the scoreboard.
Low angle, the final Bolt
The last play of the Bolt from the low camera: a two-pointer that takes the Sting from 86–87 to 88–87. 22 seconds.
Match Center ↗Mixed doubles, last seconds
Dalayna Hewitt’s two-pointer in the closing seconds against Rise, 15 July — 156 to 158, level. 18 seconds.
Match Center ↗■ The premise
The same courts. A different product.
INTENNSE runs on the installed base American tennis already has. The arena is where we broadcast from — it isn’t what the format requires.
Why that matters to a participation target
Same courts, racquets, clubs, coaches and volunteers. What’s new is the layer on top: city teams, co-ed rosters, time-boxed matches that start and finish when we say they will, and an event built for the room as much as the broadcast.
The constraint on 350,000 courts isn’t concrete. It’s whether there’s a reason to be on them on a Tuesday.
And the same competition runs on ordinary club courts, in a dome on a weeknight, at a public facility, on a campus. A format that only works in a purpose-built studio can’t move a national participation number.
■ Residency
The team doesn’t visit. It lives there.
Every INTENNSE team has a home club. Not a venue it books — a club it trains in, year round, alongside the members.
What a resident team changes
A tour moves every week by design, and that is its strength for the sport at the top. But it means the professional game arrives in a city, is watched, and leaves. The relationship resets each year.
A team with a home club does the opposite. The professionals and coaches are in the building on ordinary days, next to the juniors on the next court and the adult league on a Wednesday night. The kids don’t watch a player on television and hope — they train down the hall from one.
That is where team identity actually comes from. Fans don’t attach to a fixture list; they attach to people they have met, in a place they already go. And it is why the league can grow its own recognisable figures over time rather than renting them: a resident professional becomes a local one long before they become a famous one.
■ The proof, already inside your organization
USTA Atlanta coached eight of our athletes, then said so publicly.
Amy Bartlett O’Connell, Executive Director of USTA Atlanta, coached eight INTENNSE athletes through the 2026 season with the Outriders. On Championship Weekend she wrote about it on her own feed.
“Innovative, fast-paced, co-ed team format challenged our players in new ways while creating an electric atmosphere that brought a fresh energy to the game.”
Amy Bartlett O’Connell · Executive Director, USTA Atlanta · 31 July 2026
She described the league as committed to making tennis “more engaging, more accessible, and more fan-focused… and FUN!” — which is the same word the kid in the stands reached for, unprompted, at the top of this page.
We didn’t commission that, and we didn’t pay for it. A section leader inside your own organization ran a roster in the format for a full season and recommended it on the record, closing with: “I truly believe we’re only seeing the beginning of INTENNSE.”
If the structural problem you’ve named is that the parent organization and its 17 sections don’t pull together, this is a small piece of evidence pointing the other way — a section and a format-innovative league already working, in one of the country’s deepest tennis markets.
■ The cadence
“I would like to see events every single week, so American players can stay basically at home and go from coast to coast, city to city, and play and become a top-100 player.”
Craig Tiley · Sports Business Journal · 21 August 2026
That season already exists. It ran this summer, in one city, on a schedule built for exactly that shape: a fixed window, a weekly rhythm, teams that travel, and players who stay in the country to compete.
Season 2 closed on 1 August with Freeze beating Outriders 137–130. The infrastructure to repeat it in ten cities is built; the format is proven on air; the question is how fast it scales and who it scales with.
The Rules of INTENNSE, explained · 2:04
INTENNSE is Back! · 1:00
Record live concurrents across the final series.
Average across forty local airings on Peachtree; the best single Arc drew 116,000.
Two broadcast, two RSNs, seven FAST, three streaming — 60% of watch time on TV.
Peak rating on Peachtree, the local broadcast partner.
■ The pathway
Children can play the exact thing they just watched.
The reason a professional league belongs in a participation conversation is that INTENNSE is the same game at every level. A child who watches an Arc on Saturday can play that format on Monday — same rules, same team structure, same identity, on the court that’s already down the road.
Tennis has always had that continuity, and it’s a real advantage: a club player on a Tuesday uses the same court and the same scoring as a US Open final. What the sport hasn’t had is a version of itself built to be watched — matches of unpredictable length, scoring that assumes you already know the game, and nothing local to belong to once the broadcast ends.
Our bet is on the last of those. A team with a name, a city and a season is a retention mechanism, which is what your first pillar asks for: programming that keeps new and returning players on court for life.
We won’t overclaim it. Season 2 is the first season at this scale, so we cannot yet show you a cohort that watched an Arc and joined a league. What we can show you is that the format is identical from the arena to the junior program — which makes that number measurable from the first day anyone decides to measure it.
Junior
Entry programs, camps and local leagues in the team format.
School
High-school and collegiate competition on the same rules.
Club
Youth and adult recreational leagues at partner facilities.
Championship
Regional and national pathways that lead somewhere visible.
The ballkeeper pathway
Ball keepers aren’t staff here. The single-ball rule and the serve clock make them part of the competition, part of a team — which turns a first afternoon on a professional court into a whole family’s way into the sport.
The Challenge Series
An open draw where the winners are drafted into a Challenge Team, coached by a guest professional, and earn an exhibition against a professional roster. Sadira Ouyang played our first junior event in 2024 at fifteen and has earned her way onto the Challenge teams in every season since — seeded at USTA hardcourts by sixteen, with $1,200 in prize money from an INTENNSE qualifier. Money moving toward a junior’s development rather than away from it.
■ An avenue worth testing
College tennis is a broadcast property nobody has built yet.
You already know what college tennis can carry, because you built it once — an interim job nobody wanted, nine straight conference titles, and a perfect season at the end of it.
College tennis is team tennis. It has rosters, rivalries, campuses, colors and a built-in calendar — every ingredient March Madness monetizes, and almost none of the packaging. It goes largely unwatched because nobody has made it legible to a broadcast audience or a brand buyer: no consistent match length, no scoring a casual viewer can follow, no reason for a sponsor to plan a season around it.
That is precisely the problem the INTENNSE format solves. Time-boxed matches, simplified scoring, team identity, predictable windows — applied to a property that already has the affiliation and the passion, at a moment when USTA leadership has publicly called the erosion of the college pipeline a crisis.
A branded, bracketed, broadcast college championship in the INTENNSE format is one avenue this opens. Given where you started, we’d value your perspective on how INTENNSE could strengthen the development pathway.
There is a second effect we’d want your read on, and it runs through the whole league rather than just the college question — see below.
■ Gender balance
Equal places aren’t a policy here. They are the format.
Every INTENNSE team fields three men and three women, in the same match, on the same court, in front of the same broadcast. The women’s results decide the tie exactly as much as the men’s.
That has a consequence the league cannot opt out of: every team that exists creates as many paid professional places for women as for men. It isn’t a commitment we might under-deliver against in a hard year. It is arithmetic. Ten teams, thirty women on court, and the same again the moment a city is added.
Which is why we think this structurally strengthens the women’s field rather than sitting alongside it. A tour is only ever as deep as the layer feeding it, and in tennis that layer has never existed — a player who can’t fund two years of speculative travel doesn’t drop to a lower professional tier, because there isn’t one. She leaves at twenty-two. Every team place we add is a woman who keeps playing for money, stays match-fit, and is still in the sport at twenty-six.
This year’s draft drew 144 women among 373 applicants. They weren’t waiting for an invitation to the tour. They were looking for somewhere to keep playing.
■ The structural squeeze
Built the other way round.
INTENNSE is the one place in the sport where a player outside the top 200 is paid simply to compete — a $40,000 base before a single match is won. That is the problem the tours have never solved: how to financially support the players who aren’t in the slams.
The pattern it runs against
Across top-tier sport the same shape keeps repeating. Revenue concentrates at the apex — premium hospitality, media rights, a handful of marquee events — while the developmental base that feeds it gets comparatively little. Spectacle is easier to finance than grassroots, and the gap compounds quietly for years before anyone names it.
Tennis carries a sharp version. The professional game is extraordinarily healthy at the very top and unforgiving a few hundred places down the ranking, where players fund their own travel for a shot at prize money that rarely covers the trip.
We aren’t claiming to have fixed that at scale — roughly eighty players are paid that base for an eight-week season. But it isn’t drawn off an existing base to inflate an event. It’s a tier that didn’t exist, with a professional draft, real rosters, and total season earnings of up to $70,000.
373 players registered for this year’s draft, up 748% on last year. That is a base thickening rather than thinning — and it’s the measure we’d want to be judged on, ahead of attendance or impressions.
■ Your own playbook
You have already built both halves of this. Once a year, each.
The United Cup put men and women on the same team sheet at the same weight — one men’s singles, one women’s singles, one mixed doubles, and a woman’s win worth exactly what a man’s is worth. It launched with the tours in 2023, under your leadership at Tennis Australia, in place of the ATP Cup. Your own words at the time:
“The United Cup presents a unique opportunity to unite both the men’s and women’s tour in a brand new way that has never been seen before.”
Craig Tiley · Tennis Australia · 27 October 2022
The AO 1 Point Slam put amateurs on court against professionals. In January a Sydney club coach named Jordan Smith came through a field that included Sinner, Świątek and Gauff and took the million dollars, with fifty thousand more going to his club.
INTENNSE is those two ideas running as a season rather than a fixture. Three women and three men on one cumulative score, eight weeks of it — and an open-entry draw inside every event where sixteen men and sixteen women enter and the top three of each earn a place on a team that plays a professional side that week.
■ Why we sent this
There’s no ask attached to this.
We’re not asking the USTA to adopt a league, fund one, or endorse one. You’re two months into the job with a number to move, and you haven’t finished deciding what you want to move it with.
We’ve built something in Atlanta that may turn out to be useful to that number. We’d rather you simply knew it existed — and knew that one of your own section directors has already run a roster inside it — than arrive with a proposal before you’ve set your own direction.
If any of it is worth an hour, we’ll make the time whenever it suits you. If it isn’t, we’ll keep building, and this will have cost you nothing but the scroll.
■ Where an hour could lead
Not proposals. Just the shapes this could take, if the idea appeals at all:
College tennis
Weight behind the push to turn it into something people can actually watch, follow and buy into.
A fixture inside US events
An INTENNSE session built into ATP, WTA and ITF weeks on American soil — more tennis in the week, and more reasons to be in the stands for it.
Players who go out early
First and second round losers are already in the city and already paid to be there. Today they fly home. They could be the best thing on court on day four.
Pros against amateurs
Local players competing through the year for the right to face a professional on that court. A pro-am where the amateurs genuinely play — and every entry is a name in the participation column.
Fan Week
You said in August that the growth is not in making the event longer but in what goes inside it. Eight days, free at the gate, and a format that seats six players and finishes in an hour and forty. A showcase in 2027 would cost a court and an afternoon.
■ From a player
Karue Sell — “the best (and highest paid) experience of my tennis career” · 19:38 · Watch on YouTube