The Night Session: Box Seats Podcast — What’s Up with the WTA?

TennisInsideOut.com presents the BOX SEATS spin-off of THE NIGHT SESSION podcast, where we discuss some of the larger issues in the world of tennis.

(Want to listen to the follow-up podcast on WTA TV, the ladies’ seeding at Wimbledon, and more? CLICK HERE!)

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For our inaugaral episode, guest Stephanie Neppl joins host Valerie David to talk about the WTA’s struggles with its image, marketing, and actual availability to both diehard and potential fans. If you want to jump to your favorite part, or easily pick up where you left off, we’ve got handy timestamps below:

0:02 NO WTA STREAMING / beIN SPORTS — After the intro, Val and Steph discuss the lack of availability of women’s tennis matches for fans, and whether WTA CEO Steve Simon’s plan of “Short-term pain for long-term gain” is a good gamble for the sport.

24:15 WIMBLEDON SCHEDULING OF WOMEN’S MATCHES — The discussion on Wimby’s sexist scheduling transitions into female empowerment and solidarity across the entire sport, including players and fans, with a brief foray into that “Best of 5” issue.

39:43 COACHING FROM THE STANDS AT US OPEN — This segment covers on-court coaching in general, the perception of coaching on the women’s tour, and the upcoming experiment with coaching on both tours during the US Open qualifying rounds.

53:55 HOW TO IMPROVE THE WTA? — Steph and Val offer their suggestions for how the WTA can improve their marketing, both on- and off-site, plus the structure of the tour.

Thank you for listening to the new NIGHT SESSION: BOX SEATS! Please RT and share the podcast if you enjoyed — we greatly appreciate it! Also, check out the RESOURCES section below for articles and websites we referred to in the podcast.

Ed.Note: Due to the vagaries of Google Hangouts, we unfortunately had some audio problems. After a lot of post-editing, the quality has greatly improved; we apologize for any remaining issues.

RESOURCES

That’s @tjc05 on Twitter who’s running TennisWatchers.com, and providing tennis fans all the details on where to watch their favorite matches.

Here’s Jeremy Davis’ rant from Tennis-X about the WTA (podcast correction: he is a writer for the site & not its owner/creator): “WTF is the WTA Doing? Website, Handling Maria, On-Court Coaching Mess“.

Ben Rothenberg of The New York Times got the original scoop on the WTA streaming mess: “Looking to Watch Women’s Tennis? For Now, Good Luck“.

The WTA’s announcement about the deal with beIN is available on their official website.

The Courier UK has the statement from Wimby chief Richard Lewis about the scheduling on the show courts.

You can watch Mary Carillo’s interview with the WTA’s Steve Simon over on Tennis.life. We really feel Mary’s pain on this one.