Who’s responsible for getting college tennis on TV?

There were two consistent topics of conversation on the grounds in Champaign, Illinois last month at the NCAA Tennis Championship:

1. The facility (read: fence)

2. Lack of TV coverage

I’ve gone on record calling Illinois the “worst NCAA host site since 2010” and shared my disappointment with the lack of TV coverage this year, so I was probably hyper-focused on these two topics while on the ground in Champaign. Nevertheless, both topics are worth addressing more as we wrap the 2022 season. As expected, the Illinois facility was entirely unbecoming of a NCAA championship. The through-fence viewing is horrendous, rainy spring weather in the Midwest won’t allow for an outdoor championship, there was no pomp and circumstance befitting the apex of college athletics, and you could hardly even get concessions. All of that aside, we need to discuss the lack of TV broadcasting coverage for the event and where college tennis coverage fits in relative to other NCAA sports. 

College sports broadcasting landscape

If you’re reading this article, then you’re a big college sports fan. It’s a unique product – rich history, obsessed fans, school rivalries, accessibility of players – and it’s never been bigger (~$8 billion in revenue per Forbes) nor more prominent in the zeitgeist (with NIL). That profile and attention has led to some incredible broadcasting milestones within college athletics this past year, most notably for women:

• 1.19M viewers watched Wisconsin beat Nebraska in the NCAA women’s volleyball championships – the most ever for women’s college volleyball on any ESPN network (link)

• 4.85M viewers saw South Carolina win the NCAA women’s basketball championship in “the most-watched college basketball game on ESPN (men or women) since 2008” (link)

• Women’s gymnastics peaked at 1.1M viewers on ABC – an 11% year-over-year increase and the most-watched college gymnastics meet ever

• The women’s lacrosse championship aired on ESPN for the first time ever (link), women’s softball aired on ABC for the first time ever (link) and earned 1.25M viewers (link), and for the first time in a decade, women’s water polo returned to TV on ESPNU (link)

The momentum for college sports is palpable and exciting. Just over Memorial Day weekend, you could turn on the TV or stream live: women’s lacrosse, softball, baseball – all with thousands of cheering fans in attendance. 

So where is tennis?

This academic year, 25 of the 30 NCAA championships aired on television or were streamed by ESPN. Tennis joins rifle, skiing, rowing, and men’s water polo as the five outliers. 

The NCAA tennis championships were streamed exclusively on the TennisOne App; the other 4 sports were streamed on NCAA.com. Regardless of your thoughts on TennisOne, an app that is not currently in the top 200 sports apps on the iOS store (ESPN is #1 for context), it’s clear that tennis is falling significantly behind other sports when it comes to broadcasting.

It’s particularly jarring when you consider the fact that NCAA tennis used to get TV coverage on ESPNU and Tennis Channel. Last year, the Tennis Channel covered 16 hours of the NCAA tennis tournament in Orlando from the team quarterfinals onward. Not only was that coverage lost in 2022 but it still paled in comparison to NCAA golf, which is a good comparison as its NCAA tournament airs on another sport-specific channel (The Golf Channel). The Golf Channel carried nearly 80 hours of NCAA championship coverage this year. Even the years considered a “success” by college tennis standards are far behind the other sports – and not just those that drive revenue. 

Here is a list of all 30 NCAA championships this year and where the championship was broadcast:

Where does the buck stop?

The push to get college tennis on TV is not a new goal for fans – it’s been discussed as a priority for the sport’s growth for years. If you want college tennis to reach new audiences, attract young players, reward the current coaches and players, then it needs to be easily accessed through traditional mediums, like TV or well-known streaming options. Go talk to any softball coach and ask them if being on TV impacted their salary, ability to recruit, or grew the sport at youth levels – the answer is a resounding yes. 

I certainly don’t have the context behind all of the attempts to bring college tennis to TV over the years. I’m just observing and sharing the stark contrast between college tennis and the explosion of coverage in other sports. All of that momentum actually makes getting college tennis on TV more urgent than ever, else the sport risks falling further behind. The one thing, though, that I’ve found consistently missing from the “college tennis needs to be on TV” conversation is responsibility. Who is responsible for getting college tennis on TV? That lack of ownership makes a lot of the historical format changes made within the sport for the purpose of fitting into a TV-slot and side-bar conversations in Champaign seem futile. The hesitancy to “point fingers” means tennis has made little progress over the years. Some potential owners:

Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA): The ITA is “the governing body of college tennis, overseeing men’s and women’s varsity tennis at all levels – NCAA Divisions I, II and III, NAIA and Junior/Community College.” So there’s your answer, right? Maybe. While I think that the ITA can and should be doing significantly more to promote college tennis, it doesn’t oversee the NCAA championships, which is the crown jewel of the tennis calendar. How incentivized are they to promote the NCAAs? 

NCAA: Ironically, the same page on the NCAA site where I pulled the list of all 30 NCAA championships also touts the NCAA’s partnership with Turner/CBS and ESPN. Tennis must’ve been an oversight with those partnerships…But are we reliant on the NCAA tennis committee? Are they outraged about the 2022 facility, lack of coverage, and demanding it improves in 2022? Someone is doing it for other non-revenue sports across the NCAA, so maybe? It’d be great to have more public transparency if these conversations are happening.

USTA: We don’t talk about how much the USTA benefits from college tennis and the commitment they should demonstrate as a result of those benefits. I wrote more about that when I argued that the USTA should award the NCAA champion a US Open wild card regardless of his or her nationality. USA Softball has been promoting the women’s College World Series non-stop and benefits significantly from the promotion of the championships and the interest it creates at all levels. The USTA could be similar. Investing in college tennis as a showcase for the sport could lead to more recreational players, more interest at the grassroots, and even more attendance at the US Open. Is that value prop enough for the USTA to care? Maybe not. 

Coaches: Coaches probably have the most selfish reason for getting the sport on TV. They’ll get paid more and can more easily attract recruits. The Oklahoma Softball coach makes over $1M a year. Despite the personal incentives, it feels like individual coaches – try as many commendable coaches do – don’t have the negotiating power needed to bring the sport to TV.

From my vantage point, getting college tennis on TV requires a triad of responsibility between the ITA, USTA, and NCAA. Thankfully, these organizations already have a forum where they meet: the NCAA Tennis Committee. 

There are 12 NCAA Tennis Committee members, and, with the majority of them being in Athletic Director roles, they should understand how to prioritize college tennis within the NCAA and can leverage learnings from other successful sports. Leadership from the ITA and USTA already have seats at the table in these committee meetings. For example, three people from the ITA (Tim Russell, CEO; Cory Brooks, Senior Director – Competitive Department; and Dave Mullins, COO) and two people from the USTA (Tim Cass, General Manager of the USTA National Campus and Elissa Hill, Senior Director of College Tennis at USTA) attended the committee meeting in June 2021 to discuss NCAA automatic qualification. Combined with the NCAA’s relationship with Turner Broadcasting and ESPN, the leadership from the ITA and USTA bring: (1) an incentive to see the championships on TV; (2) sport-specific relationships and influence to negotiate on behalf of the sport. I look forward to this topic being discussed at an upcoming committee meeting and this triad pushing for college tennis to be showcased on networks beyond just the Tennis Channel (like ESPN properties) so it can reach new fans. 

Let me know your thoughts on who has the power to make these changes and how we can influence these organizations – I’d truly love to hear. 

Making progress beyond a TV partnership

This year, TennisOne made it easier to find all of the existing, free streams in one place by aggregating on their app, and Cracked Racquets has made great strides in broadcasting regular season matches with their SEC and Big Ten partnerships, both of which prove that college tennis can be packaged for broadcasting. 

There’s also still a lot of grassroots work that needs to occur just to get butts in seats. Schools like Baylor, which had 1,600+ fans at their Super Regional match, are a great blueprint for how to engage the community and make college tennis an exciting event to attend for all ages. 

The purpose of this article is to provide people with relevant information about what’s happening in NCAA sports so that they can either take that info to their behind-doors conversations, or we can start having an honest conversation about how to make progress on behalf of college tennis because the current situation isn’t tenable. We all want the same thing: more people watching and playing college tennis. I hope we can get there.

Feel free to bring the conversation to Twitter @JTweetsTennis.