The State of Australian Tennis...
And how Rally and other platforms can spread tennis, pickle and Padel Down Under
Jan 10, 2025
Melbourne Park, the site of the Australian Open, has become the center piece of Victoria’s — and Australia’s — sporting society. But elsewhere, tennis is floundering.
In October 2015, then Victorian Treasurer, Tim Pallas, opened the new Melbourne Park, site of the country’s National Tennis Centre and the Australian Open by saying, “We’re investing in our sporting infrastructure to ensure it remains the envy of cities all over the world, and to maintain our status as the sporting capital.” Pallas was just echoing the mantra of Melbourne’s urban renewal strategy — similar to strategies in a number of other post-industrial cities: transforming a manufacturing hub to a consumption capital, with sport at the centre. And the sport of choice? Tennis.
Sport remains much at the heart of Australian national identity — even more so than in England and Ireland. First played in Australia is 1878, by the end of the 19th century tennis had spread across the country and in the first half of the 20th, Australia had the highest rates of courts to people in the world. Promoted to all social classes, the differentiation in tennis that occurred in England in America didn’t take place in Australia, overridden by the Australian sporting psyche. It also helped that Australia in the “Golden Age” of tennis, had an extraordinary streak of Davis Cup victories (15 titles in 20 years) which only served to boost the individual successes of household names Rod Laver and Margaret Court.
But while Melbourne remains tennis healthy, tennis across the rest of the country, according to people playing on the lower tiers, doesn’t offer much opportunity for advancement, propelling start-up players to seek refuge in Europe, the U.S. or England.
Australia's Storm Sanders and Ashleigh Barty discuss doubles strategy during the 2021 Olympics in Japan.
Currently nine Australian men reign in the top 100, and the familiar names of Rafter, Hewitt and Philippoussis are making the same rounds as Agassi — creeping up after 20 years away. “That’s what drives the next top 10 guys. Alex (de Minaur) is in the top 10. Does it get Nick (Kyrgios), Jordan Thompson or (Alexei) Popyrin into the top 10? And there’s all these guys knocking on the door,” said Rafter recently on the Australian Open Sit-Down podcast. But what about the women? The country’s minority aborigines? Since Ashleigh Barty abruptly departed the WTA Tour citing her home’s distance from all the major tennis events but one, and the stress of being on the road for ten months a year, no one has taken her place — not even Alja Tomljanovic, who until 2022 appeared on the Netflix show Break Point with promise to rise to the top. No Australian woman sits below Kimberly Birrell, No. 99 on the tour.
Australian tennis journeyman and author of the English book Chasing Points, Gregory Howe, blames the decline of tennis in the country to the vast closure of tennis clubs. In places like Theodore, the Theodore Tennis Club struggles to stay open in the central Queensland town, population 451, about 200 kilometres south of Rockhampton. Courts at the Brunswick Tennis Club, 165 kilometres south of Perth, were closed for more than a year waiting for refurbishment, leaving pieces of the old surface lying in piles and puddles of muddy water. In a place called Quambatook, deep in the Mallee in northern Victoria, the tennis clubs closed its doors because it could not find enough players. With population dwindling — currently around 200 — and the age demographic pointing the wrong direction, neither it nor the golf club, nor the football and netball clubs could be saved. “The government didn't protect them and the greed for real estate money means Australia has lost all its courts in the cities,” Howe said from a recent Challengers tour of the center of the country. “It makes me sad...soon Australia will no longer be a great sporting nation.”
Howe alleges that the Australian government taxed the tennis centres the same rate as buildings, and the thirst for houses meant the centres sold out for a big profit. “But now it's virtually impossible to play. And once you get an hour outside the main cities, tennis is dead,” Howe says. “I did not see one person playing on a court in the 3 weeks I drive around the rest of the state. In my hometown, they now have 16 brand new hardcourts, and not once did I see anyone on them. The rates for an hour of nightplay was about 30 US dollars, and the day about 15-20. And this is in a rural city.”
The legendary Manly Lawn Tennis Club outside Sydney, Australia, still holds tournaments and adult competition.
In 2024, Tennis Australia launched a funding round of something it calls the National Court Rebate, which provides varied levels of funding for projects such as lighting, access, complementary format courts, strategy and planning and major infrastructure projects. Tennis Australia says it is looking to increase opportunities to play tennis and address the barriers women and girls face when participating in sport and physical activity. But Howe says it is still not enough.
“Tennis Australia is trying to manufacture good players, and cover up the cracks by getting as many players into the higher ATP and WTA rankings as possible. But if I went back to live, and had a teaching job, I may not be able to play a tournament outside my school holidays, and would struggle to find people to play with or a court to hit on… in a city of 1.5 million people. It's just easier to find a public sport centre and sit on a cross trainer, or take up skateboarding like every other kid in Australia.”
[video prototype]
Rally: All Things Racquet
When I decided to revive my tennis life in my early 40s after 20 years on the New York party scene, I found that finding a place to play that a) was affordable, b) didn't require an analogue sign-up sheet to book, and c) and fit outside my working schedule was next to impossible. But instead of writing about it, I decided to put some minds together to solve the problem.
Rally, conceived of and designed by two long-time players is both a booking interface on Kickstarter and an AI-powered concierge that:
Allows players to find, book and pay for both public and private pickle, Padel and tennis courts around the world with the tap of a phone
Gives users choice among surfaces, dates, locations and times to play their favorite racquet sports
Permits private clubs to sell their unused court time on the main app and gives them a bespoke white-label booking app for their members
Matches players with coaches to help them increase their business at public/private courts, and
Provides easy access to peer-to-peer hitting, as well as sessions with professional “sparring partners,” stringing, equipment purchasing and all things tennis, padel and pickleball.
[video prototype]
We currently have a Kickstarter page to raise the money to get this all-inclusive app to the street. If you are a racquet sport player, you'll not only be investing in an app that helps the community improve access to tennis, but also that helps you book easier and play more.
For now, you can also check out plans for the app on the Rally website — with free access to some of the best tips and tricks for your game. Pass: tennis25
[video prototype]
Melbourne Park, the site of the Australian Open, has become the center piece of Victoria’s — and Australia’s — sporting society. But elsewhere, tennis is floundering.
In October 2015, then Victorian Treasurer, Tim Pallas, opened the new Melbourne Park, site of the country’s National Tennis Centre and the Australian Open by saying, “We’re investing in our sporting infrastructure to ensure it remains the envy of cities all over the world, and to maintain our status as the sporting capital.” Pallas was just echoing the mantra of Melbourne’s urban renewal strategy — similar to strategies in a number of other post-industrial cities: transforming a manufacturing hub to a consumption capital, with sport at the centre. And the sport of choice? Tennis.
Sport remains much at the heart of Australian national identity — even more so than in England and Ireland. First played in Australia is 1878, by the end of the 19th century tennis had spread across the country and in the first half of the 20th, Australia had the highest rates of courts to people in the world. Promoted to all social classes, the differentiation in tennis that occurred in England in America didn’t take place in Australia, overridden by the Australian sporting psyche. It also helped that Australia in the “Golden Age” of tennis, had an extraordinary streak of Davis Cup victories (15 titles in 20 years) which only served to boost the individual successes of household names Rod Laver and Margaret Court.
But while Melbourne remains tennis healthy, tennis across the rest of the country, according to people playing on the lower tiers, doesn’t offer much opportunity for advancement, propelling start-up players to seek refuge in Europe, the U.S. or England.
Australia's Storm Sanders and Ashleigh Barty discuss doubles strategy during the 2021 Olympics in Japan.
Currently nine Australian men reign in the top 100, and the familiar names of Rafter, Hewitt and Philippoussis are making the same rounds as Agassi — creeping up after 20 years away. “That’s what drives the next top 10 guys. Alex (de Minaur) is in the top 10. Does it get Nick (Kyrgios), Jordan Thompson or (Alexei) Popyrin into the top 10? And there’s all these guys knocking on the door,” said Rafter recently on the Australian Open Sit-Down podcast. But what about the women? The country’s minority aborigines? Since Ashleigh Barty abruptly departed the WTA Tour citing her home’s distance from all the major tennis events but one, and the stress of being on the road for ten months a year, no one has taken her place — not even Alja Tomljanovic, who until 2022 appeared on the Netflix show Break Point with promise to rise to the top. No Australian woman sits below Kimberly Birrell, No. 99 on the tour.
Australian tennis journeyman and author of the English book Chasing Points, Gregory Howe, blames the decline of tennis in the country to the vast closure of tennis clubs. In places like Theodore, the Theodore Tennis Club struggles to stay open in the central Queensland town, population 451, about 200 kilometres south of Rockhampton. Courts at the Brunswick Tennis Club, 165 kilometres south of Perth, were closed for more than a year waiting for refurbishment, leaving pieces of the old surface lying in piles and puddles of muddy water. In a place called Quambatook, deep in the Mallee in northern Victoria, the tennis clubs closed its doors because it could not find enough players. With population dwindling — currently around 200 — and the age demographic pointing the wrong direction, neither it nor the golf club, nor the football and netball clubs could be saved. “The government didn't protect them and the greed for real estate money means Australia has lost all its courts in the cities,” Howe said from a recent Challengers tour of the center of the country. “It makes me sad...soon Australia will no longer be a great sporting nation.”
Howe alleges that the Australian government taxed the tennis centres the same rate as buildings, and the thirst for houses meant the centres sold out for a big profit. “But now it's virtually impossible to play. And once you get an hour outside the main cities, tennis is dead,” Howe says. “I did not see one person playing on a court in the 3 weeks I drive around the rest of the state. In my hometown, they now have 16 brand new hardcourts, and not once did I see anyone on them. The rates for an hour of nightplay was about 30 US dollars, and the day about 15-20. And this is in a rural city.”
The legendary Manly Lawn Tennis Club outside Sydney, Australia, still holds tournaments and adult competition.
In 2024, Tennis Australia launched a funding round of something it calls the National Court Rebate, which provides varied levels of funding for projects such as lighting, access, complementary format courts, strategy and planning and major infrastructure projects. Tennis Australia says it is looking to increase opportunities to play tennis and address the barriers women and girls face when participating in sport and physical activity. But Howe says it is still not enough.
“Tennis Australia is trying to manufacture good players, and cover up the cracks by getting as many players into the higher ATP and WTA rankings as possible. But if I went back to live, and had a teaching job, I may not be able to play a tournament outside my school holidays, and would struggle to find people to play with or a court to hit on… in a city of 1.5 million people. It's just easier to find a public sport centre and sit on a cross trainer, or take up skateboarding like every other kid in Australia.”
[video prototype]
Rally: All Things Racquet
When I decided to revive my tennis life in my early 40s after 20 years on the New York party scene, I found that finding a place to play that a) was affordable, b) didn't require an analogue sign-up sheet to book, and c) and fit outside my working schedule was next to impossible. But instead of writing about it, I decided to put some minds together to solve the problem.
Rally, conceived of and designed by two long-time players is both a booking interface on Kickstarter and an AI-powered concierge that:
Allows players to find, book and pay for both public and private pickle, Padel and tennis courts around the world with the tap of a phone
Gives users choice among surfaces, dates, locations and times to play their favorite racquet sports
Permits private clubs to sell their unused court time on the main app and gives them a bespoke white-label booking app for their members
Matches players with coaches to help them increase their business at public/private courts, and
Provides easy access to peer-to-peer hitting, as well as sessions with professional “sparring partners,” stringing, equipment purchasing and all things tennis, padel and pickleball.
[video prototype]
We currently have a Kickstarter page to raise the money to get this all-inclusive app to the street. If you are a racquet sport player, you'll not only be investing in an app that helps the community improve access to tennis, but also that helps you book easier and play more.
For now, you can also check out plans for the app on the Rally website — with free access to some of the best tips and tricks for your game. Pass: tennis25
[video prototype]
Adrian Brune
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