Looking for a 2021 USTA tournament? Welcome to USTA Play Tennis!

The demise of TennisLink has been rumored for many years, some of it wishful thinking by those forced to use it, but some of it based on reports and news we've heard from the USTA about replacing it.

I wrote a few months ago about some forthcoming changes coming, namely around tournaments at first, and it appears those changes are imminent.

If you go to TennisLink Tournaments, the Find a Tournament and Advanced Search are still there, but searching for tournaments in 2021 results in none being shown.  However, if you go to the new PlayTennis site, or more specifically the tournament search there, you will find 2021 tournaments there.  It appears TennisLink is being retired for tournaments, junior and adult, effective the start of the new year and the new site will be used for searching and registering for them going forward.

I note the specific tournament search page because as I write this, it isn't easy to navigate to.  There may be some ways to get there somewhere, but I found no link to it on the PlayTennis main page nor TennisLink, and on the main USTA site you can find a link but have to know just where to go.  So just use the direct link I gave.

Once there, you can search by location and do a variety of filtering based on Junior/Adult/Wheelchair, different genders or age ranges, section/district, event type, or distance from the search location.  It would be nice to be able to search on a name as well but that is missing right now.  You can sort by distance from the search location or date, although the date sorting doesn't seem to be working as I write this and there are some other growing pains typical of a new site you may run across.

There are an increasing number of tournaments showing up, 420 last I checked, but 90+% of them are junior tournaments, so those of us adults looking for senior or NTRP tournaments in 2021 are going a bit wanting right now.  Only 35 Adult tournaments listed and only 2 remotely close to me means no tournaments in my area for awhile it appears.

Now, it is a new system and Tournament Directors and other staff need to be trained and switch to using it and that may take some time, but it appears to be a USTA sanctioned tournament, it will have to be on the new site.  Throw in COVID, reduced staff from layoffs, and TDs being unsure if they'll be able to hold their events and I'm sure that explains why tournaments are slow to show up, but we are less than a month from 2021 now so let's hope more tournaments are added soon.

For those that play USTA League, an obvious question is if/when will leagues use the new site?  As I wrote before, I'm sure that is in the plans but I'm guessing it won't be ready for 2021, so 2022 at the earliest.