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00:00 All right, so top down, first the growth of tennis.
00:07 Obviously the little tournament that you manage at the end of August every year, that US Open
00:12 with a billion dollars of economic impact for New York.
00:17 People don't understand over two weeks it's 700,000 spectators.
00:19 It's clearly the biggest event in the US by far.
00:23 But also my point is you don't have to divulge revenues, but a large part of the participation
00:30 budget, the grassroots growth, and the court development, the tournaments, is from revenue
00:37 generated from the US Open, right?
00:38 So walk us through that process.
00:40 Well, that's right.
00:41 So you have the net revenue and as a not-for-profit, that revenue is for growing the sport.
00:49 So part of it is obviously for continuing to maintain the US Open so that as the single
00:55 largest annual sporting event, not just in the country, but some argue in the world,
01:00 depends how you look at the Australian Open, we have to continue to maintain that.
01:05 But then the rest really goes to growing the game.
01:08 And so the sections, the 17 sections automatically are allocated a large portion of that revenue
01:16 because they're in the best position to grow the game locally.
01:20 And then it also supports our pro circuit events, our junior events.
01:25 And so it goes across the country.
01:26 So look, the US Open is probably over 85% of the revenue that the USTA generates.
01:34 So it's not a great business model when most everything comes from just one event.
01:40 But so long as the event happens, we do all right.
01:44 Look, the business model is only infirmed if the US Open didn't have those 44560s after
01:53 the comma.
01:54 So I think you're going to be okay as far as your business model in the future.
01:58 But as far as participation is concerned, 2022, that national tennis participation report
02:04 that you guys released talked about 24 million people playing and a million increased last
02:10 year and 33% since 2020, which also takes into account COVID and the recovery.
02:16 Happy with those numbers?
02:19 Happy with them.
02:20 But there's one part we're not happy about.
02:22 Despite all the new players, the churn ratio is just too high.
02:27 So the number of players who don't continue to play.
02:30 And so it's close right now to a one-to-one ratio, every new player and then a player
02:35 leaves.
02:36 And we have to get that if we can get that to 75%, we'll be well on our way.
02:41 And so the big focus now is not simply getting more people playing, but how do we retain?
02:47 And you do that, there's a few things that we have to do.
02:51 One is we have to massively increase the number of coaches in this country.
02:55 Our ratio of coaches to players is significantly lower than most other countries, especially
03:01 the European countries.
03:02 And we need to really boost up our infrastructure.
03:05 You know, 55% of all tennis is played in public parks in the United States.
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