L32: Qualifier vs Ryan Peniston WR 236

L32: Illya Marchenko (UKR) WR 252 (CH 49 in 2016) vs (5) Jack Draper WR 146

JonH comes home wrote:

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Challengers in France and also some of the German ones like Heilbronn are real events , often better crowds than some 250 level events.

Our established ones like Surbiton, Ilkley, do ok but nowhere near the crowd support in France

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 Marketing issue for sports other than football. I went to the British Athletics Championship 4 weeks ago. Given Birmingham has a mil and a half pop and you could buy adult tickets for both days for about 40 quid, it was a travesty that there were no more than 3000 there. There needs to be some kind of sports authority that lists links to all events with tickets available so people can see how cheap a lot of them are to attend. £120 quid for a weekend of sport for a family of 4 is cheaper than a Premier league football match 

Coup Droit wrote:

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I'm not sure it's so much about marketing issues.

It's more the number of adherents you have in the country who actually play, and the thriving club structure.

From my experience, practically all those in the crowd will be tennis players, no matter what their age. Very rare to get non-tennis players going - very rare to have tennis fans who are non-players, to be honest, too. Some might have used to play and got injured, or obviously play pretty poorly, but they'll all play.

And then you take the actual tennis club which I think has about 300 members. A very large percentage of those there on a Sunday for qualis will be club members, who'll watch a match, go to the bar, let the kids run about outside, etc.

You get a similar feel at Surbiton, say - lots of club members. But we have a problem with having a lot less players (about 40%, I think, from the last figures I saw) and especially when events are held in general facilities, rather than clubs.

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 Makes total sense, I get this. 

paulisi wrote:

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I think marketing is quite a big factor, I suspect they only target the tennis fraternity and not the wider audience.
Also midweek matches and weather are a big factor with tennis.
Would I risk buying in advance a 150 mile round trip with no guarantees of play due to weather? Probably not.
It is also quite expensive for tickets now. I can watch a 25k for nothing a 100k challenger for under £10, but a WTA/ATP event would be approx. £40
Athletics is slightly different as they didn't have any domestic TV deal last year and thus struggled to promote their better athletes. Also UK Athletics has gone backwards over the last few years.

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 Pretty much my point, only targeting people already interested/playing. The net needs to be thrown wider. At Birmingham I was sitting in front of Christian Malcolm and Darren Campbell, Linford Christie was near me aswell. Ok our players at 25k level aren't quite Olympic medallists but it's a cheap pleasant day out and if done properly will get kids playing. Barely any kids at Birmingham, the ones involved in Athletics were probably competing themselves.