{"id":1039,"date":"2012-12-26T11:40:14","date_gmt":"2012-12-26T16:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heavytopspin.com\/?p=1039"},"modified":"2012-12-26T11:40:14","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T16:40:14","slug":"a-quarter-of-missing-challengers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2012\/12\/26\/a-quarter-of-missing-challengers\/","title":{"rendered":"A Quarter of Missing Challengers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ATP Challenger calendar (PDF<\/a>) has been released for the first quarter of 2013, and it looks mighty thin.<\/p>\n

In the next three months, we can expect 21 challenger events, compared to 30 in Q1 2012 and 33 in Q1 2011. \u00a0(Thanks to Foot Soldiers of Tennis<\/a> for raising the issue.) \u00a0For those challenger fans among us, that’s clearly bad news. \u00a0Less competitive tennis always is. \u00a0It could also hurt many up-and-coming players, which means it should concern all fans of men’s tennis.<\/p>\n

For the last twenty years, challenger tennis has generally been on the rise, with 147 tournaments at that level last year compared to only 88 in 1992. \u00a0The number peaked in 2007 and 2008 with 173 and 175 challenger events, respectively.<\/p>\n

\"Challenger<\/a><\/p>\n

However, while the challenger circuit has grown in size and importance, the ATP tour has shrunk. \u00a0Most of that movement occurred more than a decade ago. \u00a0The tour has remained steady with between 65 and 67 events each year since 2002. \u00a0As recently as 1994, though, there were 90 ATP events, which offered 36% more main draw places than did 2012’s 65 tournaments.<\/p>\n

In other words, the growth of the challenger tour hasn’t substantially expanded opportunities for players outside the sport’s elite, it has simply filled the gap left by all those missing ATP events. \u00a0The number of challengers increased by 35% from 1992 to 2002, but the number of main draw places in ATP and challenger tourneys combined rose by only 6%. \u00a0Account for the reduction of tour-level qualifying events, and you probably have a net\u00a0loss<\/em> in point- and money-earning opportunities for tour pros.<\/p>\n

The following five years brought the explosion of challengers noted above, but the pullback to 2012’s level of 65 ATP and 147 challenger events has reduced the field to only 7432 total main draw places, a 9.5% increase over ten years earlier.<\/p>\n

A 10% jump over the course of a decade may<\/em> be enough to keep pace with the global spread<\/a> of tennis, but it won’t be if the current downward trend persists.<\/p>\n

That’s the reason for concern. \u00a021 first-quarter challengers represents a 30% decrease from 2012. \u00a0Drop 30% of the challenger events from the entire 2012 calendar, and you have only 103 events, the lowest number since 1996, where there were 97 challengers but a whopping 84 tour-level tournaments.<\/p>\n

The ripple effect<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, when the size of the top-tier tennis world shrinks, who suffers?<\/p>\n

Small as these paydays are, when the number of challenger-tour paydays drops, some fringe-level players earn fewer of them. \u00a0The relevant “fringe” here is the ranking range between 200 and 300, the guys who often make the main draw cut of a challenger when there were two or three in one week, but are relegated to a futures or (unpaid) qualifying draw when there is only one.<\/p>\n

Less obvious is that even the top-ranked challenger-level contenders suffer. \u00a0Fewer tournaments generally means more travel–that is, greater travel expenses. \u00a0For Roger Federer<\/a>, that’s just a different balance on his NetJets account. \u00a0For Diego Schwartzman<\/a>, it means more weeks where he\u00a0loses<\/em> money playing competitive tennis, and fewer upper-level events that are feasible opportunities for him.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, there are far more Schwartzmans than there are Federers.<\/p>\n

And that brings us to the groups that really get hurt when the tennis calendar shrinks: Those who pay many of their own costs and those who don’t live in hotbeds of tennis.<\/p>\n

Players who are heavily supported by the USTA might object to additional flight time, but they don’t feel the pain of travel expenses. \u00a0Someone who can easily reach the plethora of challenger events in Western Europe will find it easy to reach plenty of playing opportunities. \u00a0An up-and-comer in the the US and Australia will get just as many wild cards<\/a> as he would have five or ten years ago.<\/p>\n

But competitors from much of South America, the Balkans, and the former USSR often do not have any of those things going for them. \u00a0With every loss of a net-profitable playing opportunity, those guys are a little less likely to stick with professional tennis. \u00a0If Gregoire Burquier<\/a> decided to pack it in, most tennis fans wouldn’t notice. \u00a0But what about the next Radek Stepanek<\/a>, who ten years ago was within a whisker of running out of money and hanging up the racquet?<\/p>\n

Let’s hope the decrease in challengers early in 2013 is a blip, not a trend. \u00a0It isn’t something anyone will talk about in the next big debate about prize money, but the quality of tennis and all professional levels depends on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The ATP Challenger calendar (PDF) has been released for the first quarter of 2013, and it looks mighty thin. In the next three months, we can expect 21 challenger events, compared to 30 in Q1 2012 and 33 in Q1 2011. \u00a0(Thanks to Foot Soldiers of Tennis for raising the issue.) \u00a0For those challenger fans … Continue reading A Quarter of Missing Challengers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-challengers","category-prize-money"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}