Jessica Pegula, the 2024 US Open runner-up, will lead a brand new 13-person panel to recommend adjustments to the ladies’s tennis calendar, rankings factors guidelines and the necessities about competing in sure occasions, in line with a letter despatched Tuesday by WTA Tour chair Valerie Camillo to gamers and match officers.
For years, tennis gamers — men and women — have complained that the game’s season is simply too lengthy and the offseason is simply too quick and lamented different components that contribute to accidents and burnout. Camillo mentioned the Tour Structure Council will make suggestions to the WTA Board; she hopes a revised setup may be permitted for 2027.
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“There was a transparent sentiment throughout the Tour that the present calendar doesn’t really feel sustainable for gamers given the bodily, skilled, and private pressures of competing on the highest degree,” Camillo, who turned chair in November, wrote within the letter, a duplicate of which was obtained by The Related Press.
Camillo’s letter mentioned the council “will focus first on areas the place the WTA has direct authority to drive change, whereas additionally figuring out longer-term alternatives that can require broader coordination throughout the game” — by working, finally, with the ATP males’s tour and the 4 Grand Slam tournaments, she defined in a phone interview.
“We’re very open to wanting broadly at a bunch of potential options to this. … The thought is: We go in there with a really open thoughts and open dialogue,” Camillo instructed the AP. “We’re not going to resolve your entire world [immediately]. … The explanation we do not need to await, ‘Hey, let’s do that as a collective system,’ [is] we need to be well timed, we need to be centered on making a right away influence.”
The No. 5-ranked Pegula, a 31-year-old American who will chair the council, “has a novel perspective as a prime participant [and is] extensively revered for her considerate, collaborative method,” Camillo mentioned.
“It is one of many hardest sports activities,” Pegula mentioned final yr, “simply if you mix, not simply the physicality of it, however the schedule, the loneliness, the psychological facet, how robust it’s to go on the market and compete, week in and week out, by your self.”
No. 1-ranked Aryna Sabalenka and No. 2 Iga Swiatek had been amongst greater than a half-dozen withdrawals from this week’s WTA occasion in Dubai. Throughout a pre-Australian Open match in January, Sabalenka mentioned she deliberate to skip some tour stops “to guard my physique.”
“The season,” she mentioned then, “is certainly insane.”
Along with Pegula, energetic gamers on the council are Victoria Azarenka of Belarus, a two-time Australian Open champion and former No. 1; Maria Sakkari of Greece, a two-time Grand Slam semifinalist who has been ranked as excessive as No. 3; and Katie Volynets of the U.S., who’s at present No. 96.
Camillo, WTA CEO Portia Archer and three different tour officers are on the panel, whose members additionally embrace Anja Vreg, an agent, ex-player and ex-umpire who’s chair of the WTA Participant Board; Bob Moran, whose Beemok Sports activities & Leisure runs tournaments in Cincinnati and Charleston, South Carolina; Laura Ceccarelli, who represents the Asia-Pacific area on the WTA Event Council; and Alastair Garland, the managing director of Octagon Tennis and member of the WTA board of administrators.
