With the current winding down of the WTA Tour and the announcement of a number of new events with other events folding, I thought it would be good to talk about the 2015 WTA calendar and how I see it unfolding so far. (This is the first part of a three part series).
When talking about the WTA calendar, there are many things which have to be taken into consideration. Some of the most important and worthwhile noting are that:
- Money talks. The more money a prospective tournament is willing to cough up, the more inclined the WTA is to accept, even if it may not necessarily be the right decision for players or fans. This is not to say that a lot of thought has gone into these events before they are announced, but the WTA needs money to operate and as a result, is somewhat restricted in what it can do.
- The ATP will probably always be more powerful than the WTA. Many of the events on the WTA tour are in fact joint events with ATP tours and many seemingly out of place tournaments on the WTA calendar are there as a result of the tournament also co-existing on the ATP tour. For most tournaments, the men’s tournament makes more money, and as a result, they will usually prioritise the men’s event over the women’s, even if it results in bad scheduling and draws.
- There are many external factors which the WTA has little control over. The WTA calendar should definitely not be treated like a chess game, where you can move random tournaments at will, even if it would work better geographically. There are many different reasons why tournaments choose particular weeks, and especially for certain events, it can be due to reasons such as the weather, national holidays or even because of sponsor deals. Whilst we as fans can critique the unsound nature of the calendar, it has to be noted that the WTA will always have more trouble than the ATP in creating a streamlined tour, just because women’s tennis is considered less popular and getting tournaments to run in the first place is considerably harder.
Now there are a number of things to talk about in relation to the changes the WTA has made to next year’s calendar (for better or for worse).
Middle Eastern Swing and Indian Wells/Miami
The Australian Open swing, including the tournaments of Sydney, Brisbane and Auckland leading up into the Australian Open will remain the same next year, but there have been quite a few changes to the calendar afterwards.
As you can see, the WTA seem to be running a number of parallel tours up against each other similar to the ATP, even though it doesn’t have the required tournaments to be able to create a continuous series. The actual changes so far have been the folding of the Premier event in Paris, which has now been replaced by the one in Antwerp, which is the revival of a former event in Belgium. Also, Kuala Lumpur has been moved back to this earlier part of the season, having been moved to a slot before the French Open in 2014. In a smart move by the WTA, the Monterrey event, which was initially after Miami, has been moved to just before Indian Wells, achieving a slightly more streamlined nature to the tour.
The main problem with this section of the tour is that the WTA lacks a clear direction for the three identifiable ‘roadmaps’ it has created. Whilst Dubai and Doha are large events, the main lead up in this section of the calendar is heading towards the Indian Wells/Miami double, and it has done well to create an American swing, moving up from Brazil into Mexico and then USA. As well as this, there is also the European/Middle Eastern section, with the Antwerp event followed by Dubai and Doha. The issue is, Antwerp is actually an indoor hard event and with only six of these events in total (excluding the WTA Finals), one would think that the WTA would attempt to group these together, since the majority of them are in Europe. This hasn’t been the case, however, and most of these events are just by themselves, not contributing to any substantial part of the season.
Another issue which is rather worrying are the two South-East Asian events which are by themselves on the calendar. It is understandable that the WTA would assume that players would participate in Thailand, move onto Dubai/Doha and then return to Kuala Lumpur before flying to the USA, but this is usually not the case. Many of the players who participate in Pattaya City/Kuala Lumpur are in fact those who cannot qualify for Premier events, and are thus left with the awkward decision of whether or not to play these two events or go elsewhere. If the WTA wants to be able to consistently have good draws all year round, tiny problems such as these can cause players to not play these events due to cost factors and thus reduce the overall quality of these events.
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