SYDNEY: Tennis has been slow to embrace innovation partly due to its success in a golden era dominated by global superstars but the sport must now strive to move with the times, the tournament director of the United Cup said on Thursday.

Stephen Farrow, who oversees the popular $10 million mixed team event that signals the start of the new season, is keen to continue collaborating with the ATP and WTA to spark changes that can deliver a richer experience for players and fans.

“I think tennis is just a very traditional sport and certainly in more recent years it has been incredibly successful,” Farrow told Reuters via phone from Sydney.

“We’ve had some of the greatest players ever to play the game. Obviously with Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, we got so many great champions that tennis has done really well.

“We’ve seen that at the Grand Slams. We had over a million people come to the Australian Open last time. So when you see so many people coming in through the door, there’s probably less pressure to try and look at ways that you can innovate.

“There’s a lot that’s right about tennis ... but all sports have a duty to renew themselves and continue looking at ways to enhance the game.” Farrow said that although tennis was among the first sports to adopt technology, specifically Hawk Eye replays and electronic line calling, it had held itself back from widely implementing features that have since become common elsewhere.

He pointed to the huge success of courtside team zones that help ramp up the atmosphere at the United Cup and where players and coaches can access live statistical data and analysis.

“We also introduced strategy rooms at the ATP Cup, the United Cup and the Australian Open where you’ve got access to this data and analysis that coaches can go into with their players to brief them,” Farrow added.

The 18-team United Cup, which runs from Dec 27-Jan 5, will introduce 60-second timeouts — activated when a red buzzer is pushed — during the often crucial mixed doubles matches, giving competitors the chance to catch their breath and talk tactics.

A maximum of one timeout per team can be used.

“We really see ourselves as an event in which innovation is a big part of the DNA,” said Farrow, who took charge as director of tournaments, player and international relations at Tennis Australia in 2021.

“We can try things out, which hopefully we can then go on to introduce at the Australian Open and more widely in due course.” Speeding up matches at the United Cup is another goal that Farrow hopes to achieve in future.

“Personally I’d like to see shorter matches and I don’t necessarily mean by changing the scoring format or anything like that,” he added.

“It’s more things like the warm-up, the time between points, the toilet breaks, the change of ends. That can be sped up.

“Tennis is the only sport in the world where you do a big introduction to the players coming out and then they go and hit the ball to each other to warm up for five or six minutes.

“That deflates the atmosphere at a point of high tension. I’d love if we could get to the point where the players walked out and played. That’s something we would love to do at the United Cup. We’ll continue to push for it.”

Published in Dawn, December 20th, 2024