Tennis Parents You Gotta Get This App!

Summary

Lindsay Lee Waters — career-high WTA #33 who turned pro at 16, played 20 years on tour, and returned to competing at nearly 40 — and her husband Heath Waters — ATP/WTA registered coach since 1998 who started an Atlanta academy in 1994 and had three girls top-10 in junior world rankings — introduce the Match Tennis App, a tournament management platform they built to solve the specific organizational pain points of junior tennis families. The episode documents the app’s six core features (tournament search, deadline reminders, doubles partner finder, applicant sorting by ranking, tournament calendar integration, and UTR event access) and makes the case for UTR’s level-based tournament format as the superior developmental environment for junior players. Heath and Lindsay’s dual perspective — as tour-level coaches, active tour players, and current junior tennis parents — gives the product an unusually authentic origin story.

Guest Background

Lindsay Lee Waters grew up in Oklahoma, moved to Atlanta at 15 to train, reached a career-high national ranking of #5 as a junior, turned professional at 16, and played 20 years on the WTA Tour reaching a career-high singles ranking of #33. She retired, had two children, and returned to competing at age 39 (on the eve of her 40th birthday), qualifying in recent events and beating opponents 20 years younger. She coaches junior players alongside her husband between tournaments.

Heath Waters played college tennis at Auburn-Montgomery and began coaching immediately after graduation. He founded an Atlanta-based tennis academy in 1994 and has been an ATP and WTA registered coach since 1998, working with players at all levels up to the professional tour. At one point he had three junior girls simultaneously ranked in the top 10 in the world. He and Lindsay have a daughter (artistically inclined, not pursuing tennis) and an 11-year-old son who plays junior tournaments — making them active junior tennis parents navigating the exact system their app is designed to simplify.

Key Findings

1. The App Was Born from Real Pain: Hours-Per-Month to Minutes-Per-Month

The Match Tennis App emerged from Lindsay’s frustration with the time cost of managing her son’s junior tennis schedule — finding tournaments, checking rankings, registering, finding doubles partners, tracking entry deadlines, maintaining a calendar. She estimated the process was consuming hours per month across multiple websites, spreadsheets, and communication threads. The app’s stated mission: convert hours per month into minutes per month. Every feature was designed from a specific pain point the Waters family experienced personally.

2. Doubles Partner Finder: From Five Days to 30 Minutes

Heath describes the most concrete time-saving feature: the doubles partner finder. Before the app, finding a tournament doubles partner required contacting the tournament director, waiting for a callback, calling a suggested contact, finding they had already found someone, cycling back, and repeating — a process that took five days for one tournament in Jackson, Mississippi, and likely consumed significant tournament director time for every player going through the same loop. The app creates a self-service doubles partner request list within each tournament, enabling parents to see all players looking for partners, check their ranking with one click, and send an auto-populated email. Heath’s last two tournaments: doubles partners found within 30 minutes each time.

3. Registration Deadline Reminders: Never Miss a Tournament Again

Lindsay describes the family’s experience of their son nearly missing his first national event because she thought Heath had entered, Heath thought Lindsay had entered, and no one had. The app solves this by sending automated email reminders three days before and the day of every tournament deadline the user has saved to their calendar, with a direct link to the registration page. Since building the app, the family has not missed a single deadline. The feature addresses a near-universal pain point: tournament deadlines vary (noon vs. midnight, different advance notice windows) and USTA’s TennisLink system historically did not push notifications to registered families.

4. Applicant Sorting by Ranking: Making the Alternate List Legible

One of Heath’s “favorite features”: the ability to sort all applicants for a tournament by state, sectional, or national ranking with a single button press. Previously, determining whether a player would make it into a tournament with 80-90 applicants required manually looking up each player’s ranking — Heath describes doing this for 84 players before one tournament, a four-hour process. The app sorts the full applicant list instantly, enabling families to determine in seconds whether their player will make the draw, identify their likely seeding, and make tournament selection decisions (traveling to a tournament where their player will be an alternate vs. entering a more accessible local event) without the manual research burden.

5. UTR Integration: Level-Based Tournaments Are the Superior Developmental Format

Heath advocates strongly for UTR’s tournament format as aligned with the app’s mission of optimizing the junior tennis experience. He describes meeting Kevin Epleg, then-coach of South Carolina, at the 2017 NCAA championships: “We only look at UTR, that’s it.” The ITA’s five-year deal with UTR is presented as evidence that UTR ratings are the currency college coaches use to evaluate recruiting prospects. The app is integrating UTR event search and player ratings alongside USTA rankings, positioning itself as a neutral portal (Heath’s analogy: Yahoo as an aggregator, not an advocate for one system). Randy Jenks (UTR’s global director of events) later validates in the Sol Schwartz episode that level-based UTR events produce competitive matches 60% of the time vs. age-based formats.

6. Tournament Director Version — Push Notifications Solve Lisa Stone’s 10-Year Complaint

Heath describes a separate app version for tournament directors, enabling them to push real-time notifications (draws posted, rain delay, round times) directly to registered players and parents via text, email, Facebook, and Twitter simultaneously — one data entry, all channels. Lisa Stone notes she had been writing to TennisLink/USTA for years requesting exactly this functionality. The tournament director app creates a communication infrastructure that eliminates the parent behavior of compulsively checking the USTA website during tournament weekends.

7. The “Process Over Outcome” Coaching Philosophy Built Into the Product Vision

In discussing how parents might use ranking data in the app to avoid competitive opponents (a concern raised about UTR gaming), Heath articulates a coaching philosophy that underpins the product: “Our objective as coaches and as parents needs to be to take the handcuffs off the players and let them play freely.” He describes the most damaging parent question as “Did you win?” rather than “Did you have fun? What did you improve? Did you try your hardest?” The app is designed to give families better information for decision-making, but Heath frames the information within a development-first ethos — the best use of applicant sorting is identifying where your child will get competitive matches, not avoiding opponents to protect their ranking.

Actionable Advice for Families

• Download the Match Tennis App (matchtennisapp.com, available iOS and Android) and set up tournament deadline reminders for every event on your child’s schedule — the single most damaging tournament management failure (missing a deadline) is entirely preventable with automated reminders
• Use the doubles partner finder feature immediately upon registering for a tournament rather than waiting until deadline week — earlier contact gives more time to evaluate fit and confirm arrangements
• When using applicant sort features, use them to seek out competitive matches (players within 1-2 UTR points of your child) rather than to avoid strong competition — college coaches are looking at UTR results in competitive matches, not blowout wins
• If your player is college-bound, prioritize entering UTR events and ITA Summer Circuit tournaments to build a ratings profile that is increasingly the primary recruiting evaluation tool used by college coaches

INTENNSE Relevance

• Tournament operations technology: The pain points Heath and Lindsay document — deadline management, doubles partner coordination, real-time communication, draw transparency — are directly applicable to INTENNSE’s match operations; the league’s team-tennis format with unlimited substitutions and compressed scoring creates its own scheduling complexity that requires similar communication infrastructure
• UTR as player evaluation currency: Heath’s confirmation that Kevin Epleg at South Carolina “only looks at UTR” validates INTENNSE’s interest in using objective level-based ratings rather than traditional ranking for player recruitment, team composition, and competitive balance
• Parent engagement and education: The app’s design philosophy — giving parents better information to support development-first decision-making — maps to INTENNSE’s family engagement vision; the league’s community events can provide parent education programming that contextualizes competition data within long-term development frameworks
• Doubles specialist pipeline: The doubles partner finder addresses a structural gap in junior tennis — players who want to compete in doubles but have no infrastructure to find appropriate partners; INTENNSE’s team-tennis format makes doubles play central and visible, creating a natural destination for the doubles-capable players the junior system currently struggles to develop
• Tour-level family model: Lindsay’s story of playing on the WTA Tour as a mother at nearly 40, with her husband as coach and children as traveling companions, is the kind of authentic tennis family narrative that INTENNSE broadcast content should capture — not just the player’s career arc but the full family ecosystem around it
• Process over outcome culture: Heath’s articulation of “handcuffs off, let them play freely” and the coaching against result-focused parent behavior maps directly to INTENNSE’s player welfare philosophy — the league’s coaching model should institutionalize the same development-first framework Heath describes, particularly in the way coaches communicate with players during matches

Notable Quotes

“We wanted to turn those hours and hours a month into minutes a month — that’s the whole concept.”

“Both times I had a partner within 30 minutes instead of five days.”

“Since creating this app we haven’t missed one deadline — and our son’s happy now.”

“Kevin Epleg, coach for South Carolina — I was talking to him and he goes, ‘We only look at UTR, that’s it, we only look at the ratings.’”

“Our objective as coaches and parents needs to be to take the handcuffs off the players and let them play freely so everything they’ve been trained can come out.”

“What’s the first question that comes out of a parent’s mouth after a match? Did you win? They didn’t ask, did you have fun? What did you improve? Did you try your hardest?”