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Why are we doing this?
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Why gotennis?
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And we have agreed on what the problem is as we define it.
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I'll give our official answer, which is the industry, meaning the tennis industry in Atlanta.
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The industry is plagued by segregated calendars, overpriced middlemen, and a disjointed
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community of social tennis players and vendors.
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The culture includes hyper-competitive tennis coaches and vendors. It includes cash-first transactions
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and a zero-sum game mentality, which discourages industry cooperation.
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So Bobby, how would you describe that problem in depth to the listener?
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Well, I think you're always going to look at an origin point.
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ALTA was created back in the day.
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And I think this is the origin story that the Atlanta City lost a professional tournament
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back in the 70s to a different city because they weren't organized enough.
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And a couple of individuals sat down and said, "We're never going to make this another
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little out of this app."
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And again, and let's create essentially what we're thinking about doing a place that people
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recreational players can get involved in tennis.
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What ALTA morphed into was a league.
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The league and the unprecedented growth of the city of Atlanta in the '90s, in the early 2000s,
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and the continues today, and ALTA became this gigantic entity that just could not,
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as you said, could not do everything that probably it initially wanted to, was very smart
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and they identified, well, that's wrong the league.
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But it is left a big void on a lot of different bases.
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Maybe the first one to tell you, look, we can't help you find a team.
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We can point you in different directions, but we don't have that ability.
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That's not what we do.
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We run a league.
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We can't run junior tournaments per se.
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We don't look into how to help your junior player get into colleges.
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We don't associate with clubs.
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It's very disjointed.
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And then you factor in the USTA, which, you know, that's a debate for another day.
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But probably from a leadership standpoint, doesn't necessarily, it's conflicted between whether
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there the organization that is supposed to grow the game of tennis or the organization that
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is supposed to produce the next Pete Samprass or Andre Agassi.
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And that leads to a lot of going nowhere, because we're never sure what we're supposed to be.
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So again, we're looking at this saying, okay, there's obviously a tremendous opportunity
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at land, there's 80,000 recreational tennis players that are registered to play out.
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T2 has done a fantastic job addressing the flexible play league, the people that can't be
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on such a right or don't want to be on such a regimented schedule.
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But it started off as a great idea.
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And I always equate this coming from the R. guys say, "Alta is a bowling league where I grew
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up."
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It's just that Atlanta has much better weather.
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So we were able to do the bowling league outside, but they tapped into a social base.
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They provided adults commonality, which as you get older, it's hard to make friendships,
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because you don't share the commonality of all going to the same school or all going
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to the same practice.
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Well now all of a sudden, tennis became such a dominant player that we did have commonality,
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but it's been unable to step out beyond that commonality to build other things.
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And again, as an aging person in the city of Atlanta who used to go to a bar kid, but I'll
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grew that.
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And now listen, I still want to social life.
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I still want to do things.
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Where do I do that?
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And I just think that that's an opportunity.
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We know we have commonality.
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We can start with tennis.
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As we say, it starts with tennis.
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Where does it end up?
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That's what we're trying to find out.
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And that's what we're trying to provide.
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And the hyper competitiveness of the industry itself from the coaches and the zero-sum game mentality.
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How do we, how is GoTennis targeting that culture change to be able to help in that way?
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Yeah, we discussed this a lot.
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How do we do it?
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How do we get everybody excited about the project as we are?
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And the hard part is it's going to take time.
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It's going to take people, getting involved.
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I just know with the people that work for me.
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First of all, I think it's probably culturally or clinical psychologist somebody can come in and
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say, look, the tennis player who reached this down kind of level that is now capable of teaching
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it.
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Tennis is a solitary sport.
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You're doing it alone.
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You're out there competing alone.
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There is not the team environment that others sport.
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So I think culturally right away, you've been raised a little bit different than somebody
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who had to survive in a team sport.
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And I think that translates and as we spoke, I find it far more fun when I'm coaching XDU,
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when I'm coaching XDF ad, when I'm coaching XDGRAG, when I'm coaching XDTN because we
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share each other's energy.
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If we're having a good time with each other, we believe that translates into the energy on
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the players.
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That's why we believe even though we're in coming, we get folks from Marietta driving
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to our drills because it's fun.
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You're going to go out there, you're going to listen to music.
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It's going to be an environment that doesn't take itself real seriously.
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It's there to maximize everybody's time together, try to accomplish something, improve obviously,
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but in an environment that fosters that and you look forward to coming back because like anything
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else, you want to just talk about it on the improvement level.
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You're never going to get better if you don't do it.
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You won't do it if it's not fun.
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So if we need you to come out and enjoy yourself and want to come back, well you're going
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to improve despite of us a lot of times.
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Hey, even if you're not the greatest coach, but that's the kind of thing we want to try to overcome.
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But it's going to take time.
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I truly believe it's going to take people seeing it, getting involved with this realizing
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these guys aren't lying.
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They're not trying to steal my business.
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To me, there's plenty of business for everybody.
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If we make it simpler and we provide access to more income streams, everybody who
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make more money too and doing it in a hopefully a fun way beyond just the court.
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