A preliminary look at some USTA League statistics for 2023 - Overall participation

It is mid-June and the calendar year is almost half over, and with it league play is in full force or even into the post-season in some areas.  That means for the most part players have signed up for teams and are playing and we can begin to take a look at some USTA League stats for 2023.

This will be a sequence of several posts as there is too much to fit into one.  To start, I'll take a look at overall participation.

For reference, here is my post from late last year looking at this metric through the end of 2022 where I also discuss different ways of looking at 2020/2021 COVID years.  I won't rehash that here and just show 2020 and 2021 as a combined single 'year' since that is how the USTA treated it for rating purposes and I'm using rating years for this analysis.  That does cause that 2 year period to look a bit high in comparison to other single year periods, but it is what it is.

Here is preliminary 2023 unique player participation in the main Adult leagues.

The year is obviously not over yet, players could still sign-up and play on 2023 teams, and some areas will have early start leagues for 2024 play during the 2023 rating year so the 2023 participation number will go up, but there is a pretty substantial drop right now from just over 243K in 2022 to just over 222K this year.  And the drop is across both women and men in about equal percentages.

To compare apples to apples, I looked at what participation was in 2022 through June 19 and that number was 227K, so 2023 is only 5K behind at this point.  If that gap remains at the end of the year, it would be somewhat consistent with, but on the higher end, of the general trend you can see in the chart above.  Most years have seen about a 3K decrease, but a few have been higher or lower than that, and only 2019 showing a real increase (about 1K).

It would seem then that participation in the main Adult USTA Leagues continues to decline.  We'll see where we end up at at the end of the year.

Note: These are statistics from the data I've gathered for calculating my ratings and generating reports and may not exactly match the USTA's data or they may report numbers using different criteria than I am.

Related: A look at the same stats by warm weather sections.  And the rest of the sections.  Then a look at Mixed.