6 Comments

Excellent piece! Well-done. Unforced error on the no-ballboying, though.

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Great reporting! I actually drove down from Richmond on the same day + it was my first time seeing tennis on this level. I did see 'Challengers' but I give credit to tennis podcasts for letting me know the event existed -- if I didn’t hear Eubanks talk about it in an interview I'd have no idea the event existed. It didn't seem like they'd promoted it outside the families of sports club members and the UVa tennis program. Which isn't necessarily bad, it just clearly wasn't a priority to treat this as a public-facing event, and the whole thing about liminal space makes sense in that light. Again, fantastic piece and you really captured it well. Maybe next time you can be a ball kid.

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As a volunteer and sponsor of two Futures in Florida, I developed a long list of “improvements” for Futures players. Food, housing, laundry service, ice, transportation, and volunteers top the list.

An important task is promoting “pro-ams” in advance. That can give ‘pros’ some cherished pocket money. Collecting payments from “delighted to” small and medium businesses in advance of the start of the tournament is mightily important.

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Loved this read, really intrigued by the players and logistics at the Challengers.

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Thank you!

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Great reporting--I need to see if I can find one of these around where I live. Interesting that the conversations you overheard did not even touch on the election. Maybe the pro athletes had already reviewed the 900 pages of Project 2025, saw that sports weren't a topic, so no need to follow closely.

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