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Dear Friend of the NSMTA,
Welcome to the brave new world of 2021, with the vision of better things to come for all of us! I’m starting my term as NSMTA President with the good news that we surpassed our 1000-member goal in January. We want to continue to sustain and grow our membership and find additional ways to serve our members.
One of our Board’s matters is whether having the word “Senior” in our name makes appealing to younger, but over age 35 players, more difficult. Maybe 40-year-olds don’t really feel that they are “senior” yet. Our sister women’s organization, which went for years under the moniker National Senior Women’s Tennis Association, recently changed their name to National Women’s Tennis Organization for that reason. Whether their name change results in a surge of younger members remains to be seen. Maybe a change in our motto would be a first step: “Let’s do great things for men’s tennis, together,” and omit the word senior.
Among our goals for this year are to foster competition among players on a nationwide basis. That means expanding the number of tournaments we sponsor and endorse. It also means increasing the number of events included in our NSMTA Invitational Team Series, which has been an extremely popular format. This format allows regional events to structure themselves the way they want to and emphasizes the competition’s social aspect. Currently, the NSMTA is committed to sponsoring six such events per year, and a seventh is in the planning stages on the West Coast.
We would also like to expand our Affinity Programs. Most of you know that you can go straight to the Tennis Express website for deals accessed by our homepage. We’ve also connected with Amazon Smile, which benefits the NSMTA when you make a purchase on Amazon at no cost to you. For those traveling to tournaments, we have recently partnered with Stay 22 which shows multiple accommodation options filtered by budget, room type reviews, and more via a searchable map.
Tournament players have complimented us on how much easier it is to navigate our Tournament List than the information available on the USTA website. We continue to update it on almost a daily basis as information about cancellations, postponements, and other schedule changes come in.
Our Forum has been active, and we appreciate your participation. We’ve noticed certain themes specifically with the new USTA Tournament structure for 2021, have been hot topics including Local and Sectional Ranking, Eliminating National Indoors as Level 1 (gold ball) events, and the difficulty in using the USTA’s tournament search feature. On a positive note, the USTA recently sought out feedback from NSMTA regarding some of the changes they’re implementing. For instance, it turns out that Local and Sectional rankings will still be available.
Hopefully, with your continued suggestions and complaints coming in, we can help them tinker with the system enough to overcome some of the initial issues. We will address some of these issues in an upcoming message. In the meantime, we have to hope that the vaccine’s more widespread availability will eventually result in fewer tournament cancellations and a more predictable schedule!
Sincerely,
Steve Duffel
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