By Randy Walker
@TennisPublisher
It’s pretty flattering when you run a $15,000 U.S. Tennis Association Pro Circuit event – the bottom of the barrel of professional tennis as an entry-level event – and you consistently get told by players, coaches and fans that your event is run on par with an ATP World Tour event or a Challenger-level event.
That is exactly what we experienced at the Mardy Fish Children’s Foundation Tennis Championships at Grand Harbor Golf & Beach Club in Vero Beach, Fla. The 2018 edition of the event marked the third year that Tom Fish, the father of 2004 Olympic silver medalist Mardy Fish, and I served as co-tournament directors of the event after the tournament was run by Vero Beach teaching professional Mike Rahaley, a P.T. Barnum type tennis promoter who created the foundation and tradition in this coastal oasis. Vero Beach being blessed as a tennis-obsessed town combined with an amazing group of dedicated tournament volunteers and the Grand Harbor Golf & Beach Club venue and staff being passionate and resourceful made this tournament be the best-run and most professional “Futures” level tournament in the world.
With all the accolades we had, raising a great deal of money for the non-profit Mardy Fish Children’s Foundation, I wanted to share 10 things that helped us achieve this level of achievement and respect at our event.
Charge Admission – Even though “Futures” events don’t feature star players (average fans have likely not heard of any player in your event), you must assign a value to your attending matches so you must charge an admission price. Even if it is just $5 or $10 per day, it is important to assign value to admission. This also adds value to your sponsorships as you can give a certain amount of tickets with a sponsorship. You can also give out tickets to people who do favors for you and if you give them tickets in return, these have a value. It’s free to watch two hackers play singles in the public park so don’t equate your event to that. You have to treat the event as a big-time event for people to perceive it as such.
Varying Match Times and Prices – In Vero Beach as in almost every community, there are different demographics of fans, so we offered different times to watch tennis and at different pricing. In my first year working with the event, we started daily matches at 10 am, but only a small handful of fans where there at that time as many tennis fans in Vero Beach play tennis in arranged games from 8 am to 10:30 or so. Therefore starting at noon gave these fans a chance to play tennis, go home and shower and come out for the noon matches. We found that many people came to the tennis at noon for their lunch breaks from work. Also for the working folks, we made sure that we had a night match for the four weekday sessions we hosted from Tuesday to Friday. For our first year, we chose 6 pm as the start time, but with the sun angle at that time in Florida being very uncomfortable for fans, we moved it an hour later to 7 pm and saw a significant increase in attendance for night matches. People now had time to leave work, relax a bit, then head to the tennis, where they also could grab a bite to eat and get a cocktail. For our main draw session, we charged $20 per day. We received some fan criticism of this in my first year with the event, so we created a half-price $10 “Happy Hour” ticket that started at 5 pm. Fans could come to the tennis at 5 pm, about halfway through the day, and get a ticket for half-price and they could enjoy the end of some of the days matches and also enjoy the 7 pm night match. If you bought a $20 day pass, you could come for the lunch matches at noon, go home for a few hours, then return for the 7 pm matches – a good value! Our fans earlier in the day were older and the night crowd was younger and in the working-class age.
Entertainment – Die-hard tennis fans will attend your event, but how do you bring in the casual tennis fan or sports fan? Provide additional entertainment options. Have good food and drink options – with specials. People might be more lured to come for a BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwich with a cold beer than watching the No. 17 player from Germany play tennis. We hosted two BBQ-special nights and a Margarita and Taco night as well during our event and all were nicely attended. What about a local band? In Vero Beach, we had a session where a popular local band performed and fans of the band (who were not necessarily tennis fans) came out to the tennis. Almost everyone likes to have an after-work happy hour cocktail. Convince them to have their cocktail while watching tennis!
Music – Have you been to a bar and there is no music playing? Boring, right? When there’s music, it puts you in a better mood, sets a scene and makes you happy. So, incorporate music in your event. In Vero Beach, the Mardy Fish Children’s Foundation receives an annual grant from the Jake Owen Foundation, named for the famed country music singer who is a native son of Vero Beach and a childhood friend of Mardy Fish. So, before play began in the morning and in between matches, we always played Jake’s music and from his latest album “American Love.” When you always play the same music at an event, you can then associate the music with the event, so when you hear the music at another time and place, you will revert back to your feelings from that event and can help bring you back to the event. I first remember this practice back at the NCAA tennis championships (and many other events) at the University of Georgia when the legendary coach and director of tennis Dan Magill always played Kenny Rogers over the PA system as Rogers was a major contributor to the Georgia tennis program and the Intercollegiate Tennis Hall of Fame at the tennis facility. In 2018, we brought in a “House DJ” Ed Nalzaro who kept fans entertained (including singing himself!) and after the sun set during our evening matches, we instituted a “Disco After Dark” element where Nalzaro would play disco music in changeovers, which got fans moving and grooving and entertained during the stoppage in play.
Make Your Event More Like A Mini-US Open – Treat as many matches as you like a mini-US Open final. Get a local singer to sing the National Anthem or “God Bless America” before your night matches or before the final. This adds a level of “importance” to the event, as does a big backdrop on your court. At the French Open, you see the big “BNP Paribas” on the backdrop and “Chase” and “US Open” at the US Open. Do the same at your event! These backdrops could cost some money but it really adds to the feel of your event as being “big-time” and sponsors and fans will take notice. After our first year of using the prominent backdrop, we had sponsors and benefactors specifically tell us “I want to be on that wall!” During play, as the players are warming up, do a quick introduction of each player over the PA with some short bio information. It will make the player feel good and adds to the professionalism of the event. After the match is over, pretend you are Brad Gilbert on ESPN and bring the player in the middle of the court and do a quick question and answer session to the court. It adds to the experience and allows fans to learn more about the players and their personalities and backgrounds and helps the fans become more invested in these players, who are relatively unknown to them. This also helps market the players (see the next bullet point!)
Market Your Players/Create Stars – I always have said “Everyone has a story” so if you have a list of relatively unknown players in your field, do some digging and find their story. For starters, do an extensive Google search and see what you can find on each player. People might not be initially excited to see a player named Ricardo Rodriguez from Venezuela ranked No. 800 in the world play tennis, but when you find out that he is 14-time member of the Venezuelan Davis Cup team, he becomes more attractive and fascinating. People know Davis Cup and have a respect for any player who plays Davis Cup. Find out how many players in your field play Davis Cup or even, perhaps, the Olympic Games or who have competed in junior Grand Slam tournaments. If you can say 13 players in your Futures tournament field play Davis Cup, that’s pretty marketable. That is who was in our field of our $10,000 event in 2016! Providing fans with print-outs with bio information on each player playing each day is also an important element to the fan experience. Creating a fan, sponsor email list to blast out daily stories to also helps market your event and your players.
Scoreboards and the Fan and Player Experience – The fan experience has to positive for people to want to come to your event. A big part of this making it easy for fans to follow who is playing and what the score is. This sounds easy, but at a Futures level event where resources are more scarce, it is harder. Scoreboards on every court is essential and sending players to each court with name cards – with the three-letter country code associated with each player – to place on the scoreboard is important. Fans need to know who is playing and what the status of each match is just by looking up. This is only applicable to the qualifying rounds where there are no chair umpires running the score or for your wild card events. Bio information and player introductions are also key to keeping your fans informed, as mentioned above. The same with music and anthems, as also stated above. Treat all the players from the qualifiers to the No. 1 seed in the main draw well across the board. By putting their names up on a scoreboard and creating a clean, neat professional tournament environment add up to creating a great event. Several players came up to us in Vero Beach and thanked us after losing in the qualifying rounds. One player told me, “Thank you for making me feel like a real professional player. Had I known it was going to be this great, I would have invited me mother to watch me play. She would have been so proud.”
Wild Card Events – Staging lead-up events that award the winners main draw singles/doubles wild card entries are a great way to pre-promote your event and is a great way to raise money. For our Vero Beach event, we held two singles wild card events. One of them was held in early January in Key Biscayne, Fla., wedged between two other USTA Pro Circuit events at the time in South Florida. We charged $70 per entry and made over $1,000 after splitting the entry fees with the promoter. The second wild card event was held in early March, actually in Vero Beach, also around some of the other nearby USTA Pro Circuit events. We only made about $500 from this event, but the local community really came out to watch the tennis – 200 fans watching the final-round match – and was great pre-promotion for the main event. During our 128-player qualifying tournament, we also held a doubles wild card tournament (and ad hoc doubles qualifying event) and raised another $1,000 while creating more excitement in the community as local, aspiring teams also entered the event. It is amazing that you can create tournaments like this that result in fist pumps and passion and shrieks and yells of passion and disappointment from the players. Also in Vero Beach, there is a very popular local tournament series featuring local pros called “King of the Hill” that is held every Tuesday for six straight weeks in January and February. These matches draw about 200 to 400 fans per night. We decided to award the winner and runner-up of the “King of the Hill” series a main draw wild card into our event and we received pre-promotion of our event over a six-week period in front of an eager tennis audience.
Volunteers – Volunteers are the oil that make your engine run. Treasure them! Appreciate them! At the Futures level of tennis, you don’t have budgets to hire a big staff, if at all, so volunteers are your life blood to getting things done. Where do you recruit volunteers? For starters, look at tennis clubs and the local tennis courts where you find tennis enthusiasts who will be excited to be part of a pro tennis event. High schools and colleges are also good venues to recruit volunteers to give young people an early professional work opportunity. They could be looking for work experience or even as an internship. Don’t wear them out by having them work all day. Schedule them appropriately and remind them often how important their contributions are!
Charity – Tying your event to charity or a cause will help people come out and support your event. In Vero Beach, the cause is the Mardy Fish Children’s Foundation, a non-profit foundation that benefits children in Indian River County. People will be more willing to come support an event if it benefits a charitable cause. And, you are doing the right thing by giving back, which by the laws of the universe, will result in success.
Randy Walker is a sports marketing specialist and the managing partner for New Chapter Media (www.NewChapterMedia.com). He is 12-year-veteran of the U.S. Tennis Association’s Marketing and Communications Division, where he served as the press officers for the U.S. Davis Cup team, U.S. Olympic team and for the U.S. Open. Some of his current clients include the Invesco Series tennis circuit and the Mardy Fish Children’s Foundation Tennis Championships. He is the tournament director for the Mardy Fish Children’s Foundation Tennis Championships in Vero Beach, Florida and the nascent U.S. Grass Court Championships in Pontiac, Michigan.
