Tennis Coverage Is A Mess, But...
It may have never been harder to properly cover tennis, but maybe a new way of covering the sport is around the corner.
Hello! Happy to find you here. Here’s a post that’s more of a stream of consciousness about various things triggering my tennis brain (Tennis coverage, WTA Ventures cutting Courtney Nguyen’s position, the Bill Ackman-backed PTPA and its lawsuit, Iga Swiatek opening a window into the tricky place her mind is at right now). I’m also adding a bonus - a talk with Felix Auger-Aliassime about how he sees his coaching relationship with Fred Fontang - and launching our first kind of Q&A (send your questions over!).
This post is for paid subscribers only as I’m starting to diversify the content on offer here. The next free post will come on Monday and will include the usual TSS touch on WTH is happening on and off the courts and also my musing about tennis players and personal branding with some nice insights.
HARD LAUNCH:
The time has come! I’m opening the first Q&A of the Tennis Sweet Spot for the paud subscribers. Please send over your questions either in the comments section, on the chat, or by email. It seems easier now that imposing a day and a timeslot. Send over all your tennis questions and the questions you may have about my work, and I’ll answer by next week.
Tennis Coverage Is A Mess, But…
I said what I said. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but I really think we might be reaching rock bottom right now. I’ve been a sports reporter since 2006, and I’ve been traveling the tennis Tour since 2010: Tennis coverage in 2025 has nothing to do with what it was when I started, and from the crazy-good stories I’ve heard from older colleagues, it already had nothing to do with what’s now referred to as the golden age of tennis reporting when I started my journey. So, exactly how deep are we going to dig now?
I should also preface this by saying I’m still lucky in this day and age to be working with media clients in France and abroad who are still investing in quality coverage. I’m not being an ungrateful little b. And you can still find great pieces to read in what I’ll call legacy media and legacy tennis media. But the amount of them and the amount of them being written while on the grounds keep diminishing.
On my triggers list for this post: Iga Swiatek not being asked for a post-match press conference after losing against Mirra Andreeva in Indian Wells and WTA Ventures eliminating Courtney Nguyen’s position. There aren’t details or isolated issues, but symptoms of what’s going wrong right now in the sport’s coverage. And all of this, even though I truly believe the potential is still there to produce some riveting coverage of a sport that, again, is made for storytelling.