Patrick Mouratoglou, the coach of multiple grand slam winner Serena Williams, has expressed his intention to make Ultimate Tennis Showdown a regular fixture on the tennis calendar. The tournament, established by Mouratoglou himself, was played over five weekends at the Mouratoglou Tennis Academy during the ATP shut down, with several top tennis stars competing.
The tournament’s format differs significantly from that of traditional tournaments featured on the ATP tour, with features such as a new scoring format, power-up cards, and mid-match interviews. The reason for this is to attract new audience members to the sport.
“I think it is much more interesting to have two different products in tennis,” Mouratoglou explained in an interview. “Some of the core tennis fans will watch UTS, but we are attracting a new audience.”
Mouratoglou went on to justify his point with research findings. “If you look through the figures of the fans we have reached over the last few weeks, the average age of our fans is 30 and 50 per cent of our fans are not always watching tennis regularly. That is our goal.
We don’t know what the calendar is going to look like in 2021 with the Covid-19 crisis and all the consequences of it, so there are a lot of weeks that are available and a lot of weeks to do things and that is great.”
