Why does GoTennis! exist?

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Why are we doing this?

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Why gotennis?

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And we have agreed on what the problem is as we define it.

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I'll give our official answer, which is the industry, meaning the tennis industry in Atlanta.

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The industry is plagued by segregated calendars, overpriced middlemen, and a disjointed

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community of social tennis players and vendors.

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The culture includes hyper-competitive tennis coaches and vendors. It includes cash-first transactions

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and a zero-sum game mentality, which discourages industry cooperation.

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So Bobby, how would you describe that problem in depth to the listener?

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Well, I think you're always going to look at an origin point.

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ALTA was created back in the day.

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And I think this is the origin story that the Atlanta City lost a professional tournament

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back in the 70s to a different city because they weren't organized enough.

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And a couple of individuals sat down and said, "We're never going to make this another

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little out of this app."

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And again, and let's create essentially what we're thinking about doing a place that people

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recreational players can get involved in tennis.

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What ALTA morphed into was a league.

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The league and the unprecedented growth of the city of Atlanta in the '90s, in the early 2000s,

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and the continues today, and ALTA became this gigantic entity that just could not,

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as you said, could not do everything that probably it initially wanted to, was very smart

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and they identified, well, that's wrong the league.

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But it is left a big void on a lot of different bases.

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Maybe the first one to tell you, look, we can't help you find a team.

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We can point you in different directions, but we don't have that ability.

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That's not what we do.

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We run a league.

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We can't run junior tournaments per se.

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We don't look into how to help your junior player get into colleges.

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We don't associate with clubs.

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It's very disjointed.

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And then you factor in the USTA, which, you know, that's a debate for another day.

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But probably from a leadership standpoint, doesn't necessarily, it's conflicted between whether

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there the organization that is supposed to grow the game of tennis or the organization that

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is supposed to produce the next Pete Samprass or Andre Agassi.

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And that leads to a lot of going nowhere, because we're never sure what we're supposed to be.

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So again, we're looking at this saying, okay, there's obviously a tremendous opportunity

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at land, there's 80,000 recreational tennis players that are registered to play out.

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T2 has done a fantastic job addressing the flexible play league, the people that can't be

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on such a right or don't want to be on such a regimented schedule.

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But it started off as a great idea.

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And I always equate this coming from the R. guys say, "Alta is a bowling league where I grew

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up."

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It's just that Atlanta has much better weather.

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So we were able to do the bowling league outside, but they tapped into a social base.

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They provided adults commonality, which as you get older, it's hard to make friendships,

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because you don't share the commonality of all going to the same school or all going

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to the same practice.

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Well now all of a sudden, tennis became such a dominant player that we did have commonality,

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but it's been unable to step out beyond that commonality to build other things.

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And again, as an aging person in the city of Atlanta who used to go to a bar kid, but I'll

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grew that.

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And now listen, I still want to social life.

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I still want to do things.

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Where do I do that?

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And I just think that that's an opportunity.

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We know we have commonality.

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We can start with tennis.

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As we say, it starts with tennis.

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Where does it end up?

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That's what we're trying to find out.

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And that's what we're trying to provide.

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And the hyper competitiveness of the industry itself from the coaches and the zero-sum game mentality.

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How do we, how is GoTennis targeting that culture change to be able to help in that way?

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Yeah, we discussed this a lot.

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How do we do it?

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How do we get everybody excited about the project as we are?

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And the hard part is it's going to take time.

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It's going to take people, getting involved.

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I just know with the people that work for me.

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First of all, I think it's probably culturally or clinical psychologist somebody can come in and

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say, look, the tennis player who reached this down kind of level that is now capable of teaching

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it.

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Tennis is a solitary sport.

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You're doing it alone.

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You're out there competing alone.

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There is not the team environment that others sport.

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So I think culturally right away, you've been raised a little bit different than somebody

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who had to survive in a team sport.

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And I think that translates and as we spoke, I find it far more fun when I'm coaching XDU,

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when I'm coaching XDF ad, when I'm coaching XDGRAG, when I'm coaching XDTN because we

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share each other's energy.

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If we're having a good time with each other, we believe that translates into the energy on

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the players.

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That's why we believe even though we're in coming, we get folks from Marietta driving

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to our drills because it's fun.

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You're going to go out there, you're going to listen to music.

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It's going to be an environment that doesn't take itself real seriously.

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It's there to maximize everybody's time together, try to accomplish something, improve obviously,

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but in an environment that fosters that and you look forward to coming back because like anything

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else, you want to just talk about it on the improvement level.

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You're never going to get better if you don't do it.

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You won't do it if it's not fun.

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So if we need you to come out and enjoy yourself and want to come back, well you're going

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to improve despite of us a lot of times.

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Hey, even if you're not the greatest coach, but that's the kind of thing we want to try to overcome.

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But it's going to take time.

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I truly believe it's going to take people seeing it, getting involved with this realizing

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these guys aren't lying.

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They're not trying to steal my business.

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To me, there's plenty of business for everybody.

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If we make it simpler and we provide access to more income streams, everybody who

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make more money too and doing it in a hopefully a fun way beyond just the court.

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