By Randy Walker
@TennisPublisher
College Football has its post-season presence with its National Championship game. College basketball has its March Madness. College golf is featured prominently on Golf Channel. Now, college tennis and its NCAA Championships has its proper platform.
Starting with this year’s NCAA tennis championships at the U.S. Tennis Association National Campus, Tennis Channel, the USTA and the NCAA entered a three-year partnership for Tennis Channel to televise more than 50 hours of live matches over each day of the 10-day singles, doubles and team competition for men and women. In all, the network will provide the most hours of NCAA Tennis Championships coverage in television history.
With this important partnership, the tournament has now been perfectly wedged into this week before the French Open window of attention. While the pros are quietly waiting for Roland Garros to start, with the exception of minor prep events in Lyon, Geneva, Nurnberg and Strasbourg and French Open qualifying, the NCAAs receive a grander stage of exposure. The scheduling of the matches have worked perfectly – on purpose – where in the morning in the United States, Tennis Channel airs ATP and WTA tournament play and then at 4 pm, it airs the pinnacle of college tennis into the night. With the matches starting later in the day in Lake Nona, it provides not only for prime time TV viewing, but also an easier environment for fan attendance on site as patrons can enjoy an evening of tennis after work. Cooler evening temperatures later in the day in Orlando are also player and fan friendly.
The scheduling of match days was also changed in 2019 to provide for better viewing on television and for fans on site. In the past, the team tournament started on a Wednesday/Thursday and was played through the weekend and into the next week with the team finals being played on a Tuesday. A Tuesday afternoon team final was not the best day to showcase your exciting dramatic team finals, but a Sunday final again provides for more eyeballs on TV and in person as fans can make it a weekend to watch the men’s and women’s team finals (and semifinals the day before). All of these matches were again played in the afternoon and early evening, after the morning tennis from Europe was completed on television.
The individual tournament started on a Monday and perfectly ending on Saturday, May 25, the day before the entire tennis world focuses on the start of Roland Garros, broadcast on Tennis Channel. In the past, prior to Tennis Channel’s involvement this year in the NCAAs, the tournament stretched all the way through the Memorial Day weekend with the last two days overlapping the start of the French Open and the NCAAs receiving very little attention in the tennis world once the tennis started at Roland Garros.
After this year at the USTA National Campus, the NCAA tennis tournament will return to an actual college campus at Oklahoma State in 2020 and then back to the USTA National Campus again in 2021. In 2022, the event will be held at the University of Illinois. Many college tennis fans and observers are hoping that after 2022, the tournament will return to its spiritual home, the University of Georgia, where the event became one of the great spectacles in the sport when it majestically staged the event every year from 1977 to 1989 and for many alternating years after that.
