USTA uses Garden event to grow the game

Benign brainwashing was one purpose of Monday night's Madison Square Garden tennis exhibition, a way for American tennis officials to "get more kids playing," U.S. Tennis Association president John Vegosen said, "and maybe find some champions."

Created in 2008 by veteran sports agent Jerry Solomon, the annual one-night Garden event is the anchor for "tennis night in America," with more than a thousand tennis centers nationwide, "using this to get their tennis programs started early," USTA community tennis chief Kurt Kamperman said. "This is when they get the kids to sign up."

It will be months before the U.S. Open comes to town and tennis demands major media attention in the cavalcade of American spectator sports. So the presence of Grand Slam winners and top-ranked players on display at the late-winter Garden event has evolved into a new USTA push to increase the future player pool with its "Under-10" project.

For the first time at the Garden exhibition Monday night, a pre-match demonstration involved under-10 kids playing briefly on the court featuring lines that shrunk the regulation 100-foot court down to 38 feet.

Vegosen called it a late-dawning " 'Duh!' moment," the realization that "we were not kid-sizing our sport the way others do. We finally got it. Shorter courts, shorter rackets, low-pressure balls. What happens is that tennis becomes much more fun, much easier for people to enter into it and, I think, long-term, it will grow the sport much better, and secondly, is a terrific player-development opportunity."

"We want kids to have fun and feel confident this is something they can do," Kamperman said. The idea is to emphasize play over work. When one of Monday night's headliners, recent women's No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki, was asked what she would tell children about the demands necessary to be a top pro, her answer was, "First of all, they need to enjoy it.

"You don't have to tell small kids, 'It takes hours every day; you need to do this, you need to do that.' That's too much. Just have fun. I used to play for ice cream growing up."