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