I'm starting my year-end statistics and analysis a little earlier than normal this year. I normally wait for year-end ratings, but some of the analysis isn't dependent on them, namely participation numbers. Since my analysis uses the USTA rating year period and that just closed for 2022, I can do this analysis now.
I've done this analysis in past years, so I'm continuing the same methodology this year which is to look at unique players that played in the main Adult leagues, i.e. 18 & Over, 40 & Over, 55 & Over, and 65 & Over.
As I noted last year, trying to make sense of 2020/2021 is difficult due to how COVID disrupted league play. I did generally treat 2020/2021 as one "year" in my analysis but did take a look at how things looked if they were treated as separate years as well. I'll do some of the same below.
First, here is participation across all of the main Adult leagues treating 2020 and 2021 as separate years.
Participation is up over 10% over 2021! Tennis is growing! Well, yes, the stats show there was an increase over last year, but remember last year was still recovering from the COVID shortened 2020 that was down 23% from 2019. This is why I had combined 2020/2021 for much of my analysis.
So how does it look with 2020/2021 combined as a single year?
Using this approach we see that participation grew in the combined 2020/2021, but has taken a healthy drop this year. Treating 2020/2021 as one period for this analysis clearly has some flaws as one would not expect the growth in 2020/2021, if real, to have turned around into a significant decline this year.
But if 2020/2021 was representative, 2022 would have seen the largest drop in participation, both in raw numbers as well as percentage, since I've been doing this analysis. There were about 23K fewer players participating which was a drop of nearly 9%.
Perhaps the best way to look at this is to ignore 2020/2021 and focus on the change since 2019 since that was the last non-COVID year. 2019 was pretty flat compared to 2018, but there had been a slow/steady decline since 2013. From 276K to 258K the decline of 18K was 3K per year, or the decline of 6.5% over the six years was about 1.1% per year. If that 1.1% had continued for three years, we'd be down another 3.3% or so, or down to about 250K. The actual 2022 participation of 242K is down an additional 8K or 3.2%.
And just looking at 2022 compared to 2019, this year was down 16K or over 6%.
From this we could conclude that the decline we saw from 2013 thru 2019 has continued at an even higher rate, or participation has not fully recovered from COVID yet. The truth is probably some combination of the two.
On the other hand, given 2019 was basically flat, you might make the case that the decline had stopped and participation was going to remain flat. If that is the case, 2022 fell short of expectations by over 18K and over 6%.
Moving on to look at each age division on its own, here is the 18 & Over with 2020/2021 combined.
Here we see 2020/2021 didn't get the same bump the overall numbers did, and the drop this year was a pretty significant 9K or almost 6%. Compared to 2019 the drop is slightly higher at almost 7% and also a greater rate of decline than previous years.
Here then is 40 & Over.
This division had shown significant growth in the fictitious combined year, but had a big drop for 2022. It was 19K or 14% from 2020/2021, and the growth trend there was since 2013 to 2019 disappeared as 2022 was 9K or 8% down from 2019.
Last we look at 55 & Over.
This division had also been showing growth, particularly in 2019, but it had a modest decline in the combined 2020/2021 and 2022 was basically flat, both down just over 4% from 2019.
I think the message is pretty clear. Overall, participation may still be affected by COVID, but even considering that, the decline we've seen over the past 10 years is likely continuing.
What is interesting is that the decline is not biased as much towards younger players as it was in past years. Where 40/55 & Over leagues showed increases from 2018 to 2019 while 18 & Over declined, all declined similar amounts since 2019.
Note: These are statistics from the data I've gathered and may not exactly match the USTA's data or they may report numbers using different criteria than I am.
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