What Do You Do with a Cracked Racquet? ft. Alex Gruskin

Summary

Alex Gruskin — co-founder and host of Cracked Rackets, a tennis podcast and media operation he runs out of SoCal with co-founder Dalton, super-producer Daniel Westoff, and a small full-time team — joins Lisa Stone (who he calls his “Podmother”) for an episode that crosses between tennis media entrepreneurship, junior tournament operations, and the NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) landscape for college tennis players. Gruskin’s background is club-tennis-level play (Michigan club national championship winner), not junior academy, and his path into the business of tennis was through obsessive fandom, podcasting skills, and a DM to Cracked Rackets’ existing team in 2017. The episode is part tennis media industry discussion, part Project Elite NIL preview, and part junior tournament operations from Cracked Rackets’ foray into running events on the Universal Tennis platform. It is one of the few ParentingAces episodes focused explicitly on tennis as a media and business ecosystem rather than junior player development.

Guest Background

Alex Gruskin grew up in Michigan in a tennis family (brother played varsity), played club tennis at college and won a national championship his senior year, and started the Great Shot podcast in 2017 immediately after graduation. He connected with Cracked Rackets’ existing operation (founded by Dalton) via Twitter DM and joined the team, bringing steady content production and tennis encyclopedic knowledge. Cracked Rackets has since grown into a full-time operation with press credentials at professional tournaments, a daily show format, a junior tournament operation, match broadcasting from exhibition events, and Project Elite (a NIL-related initiative for college tennis players). He is approximately 25-26 at the time of recording and lives with super-producer Daniel Westoff in what he describes as “Cracked Rackets headquarters.”

Key Findings

1. Tennis Fandom as a Career: DM-to-Full-Time in Four Years

Gruskin’s trajectory — obsessive tennis fan at 18, club national champion at 22, Twitter DM to Cracked Rackets at 22, full-time tennis media professional at 25-26 — is one of the most concrete examples in the ParentingAces catalog of tennis as a career pathway that is not coaching, equipment, or tournament administration. The speed of the transition (from DM to full-time) was enabled by: the relative lack of competition in daily tennis podcast coverage in 2017 (“there were like five podcasts”), a willingness to commit fully (living with the team, covering press conferences at 10:45pm), and a genuine depth of tennis knowledge that produced the content quality fans came back for. Lisa Stone credits Cracked Rackets as the first media operation to crack the young fan engagement problem that the Tennis Channel had been trying and failing to solve institutionally.

2. Junior Tournament Operations: The Experience Gap Is What Cracked Rackets Filled

Cracked Rackets entered junior tournament operations on the Universal Tennis platform because Gruskin had grown up watching tournament directors struggle through events and believed a younger operator could provide a better experience for both kids and parents. His theory: tournaments are run by people who are trying to get through the finish line, not trying to make the experience meaningful. Young operators who are close in age to the players can maintain authority while creating genuine dialogue — he describes an on-court conflict between a 15-year-old and a college player where his age-proximity enabled de-escalation through relatability rather than pure authority. He uses Universal Tennis (formerly UTR) as the platform rather than USTA, which he notes also powers ITA events.

3. Project Elite: NIL for College Tennis in the Year the Supreme Court Ruled

The episode was recorded in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling enabling college athletes to monetize their Name, Image, and Likeness. Gruskin describes Project Elite as Cracked Rackets’ initiative to connect college tennis players — who have a visible social following and a compelling athletic story but no commercial infrastructure — with brands and opportunities under the new NIL framework. College tennis players are identified as particularly underdeveloped in this area: they have significant followings in the tennis world but have no established pathway for converting that into commercial value. Project Elite is framed as an infrastructure play: building the bridge between NIL-eligible college tennis players and the brands that would value their audience.

4. Daily Show Format: Tennis Requires Daily Coverage to Retain Diehards

Gruskin’s explanation of why Cracked Rackets moved from weekly to daily format: professional tennis has 12 events running simultaneously in any given week, and allowing results to accumulate means the show becomes “jammed in” and “sucks.” The diehard tennis fan needs daily coverage to stay current; a weekly show either runs two hours (which drives away casual listeners) or misses too much (which drives away diehards). The daily format is the solution — and it creates a different audience relationship, one based on habitual daily consumption rather than appointment listening. This is structurally relevant for any tennis-adjacent media operation, including INTENNSE’s broadcast strategy.

5. Tennis Channel Was Being Outworked by Fan-Created Media in 2021

Lisa Stone describes telling the head of the Tennis Channel that Cracked Rackets was doing what the Tennis Channel should be doing — reaching young fans — and recommending a partnership. The specific capability gap: Tennis Channel has institutional resources but does not understand how to produce content that makes 20-something tennis fans feel seen. Cracked Rackets, with no institutional support and a full-time team of four, was outperforming the institutional incumbent at fan engagement precisely because the creators were the fans. This gap — institutional resource vs. creator authenticity — is a structural feature of sports media that INTENNSE should understand as it builds its own broadcast approach.

6. Team Formats Resonated with Gruskin’s Formative Tennis Identity

Gruskin explicitly identifies the team environment as the emotional core of his tennis identity — high school team tennis “meant a lot to me,” and his club tennis national championship win (“winning a national championship in anything — the hubris you get from that”) is what he credits for giving him the confidence to start a podcast. The doubles partnership, in his framing, is “like a relationship” — he is still close with every doubles partner he had in high school, and his co-founder relationship with Dalton mirrors the partnership dynamic. The team format’s emotional resonance extends to his decision to run junior tournaments that include doubles and mixed doubles alongside singles.

7. Virginia Men’s Tennis YouTube Highlights Shaped a Generation of Tennis Fans

Gruskin’s account of coming of age as a tennis fan in the early 2010s names Virginia men’s tennis YouTube highlights (from Somdev through Carl Söderling, 2009-2017) as the content that made him a true believer in college tennis as a product. College tennis in team format — with the specific social energy, the individual matches contributing to team outcomes, the mix of players from different countries — produced compelling visual content that Gruskin watched “a hundred times.” This is indirect but strong evidence that team tennis, filmed well and distributed digitally, produces loyal and obsessive fans of a specific type — exactly the fan base INTENNSE should be targeting.

Actionable Advice for Families

• For junior players interested in tennis as a career beyond playing, Gruskin’s path — obsessive fan → club player → podcaster → tournament director → NIL entrepreneur — demonstrates that tennis industry careers can be built through demonstrated fan engagement and content creation as effectively as through traditional coaching or equipment industry pipelines
• When choosing between USTA tournaments and Universal Tennis events for your junior player, recognize that the platform affects more than just ranking points — it affects the competitive community and tournament culture your child participates in; Universal Tennis’s age-group and level-based system creates different player populations than USTA’s section-based system
• If your older teen is approaching the NIL eligibility window, Project Elite and similar operations are building the infrastructure to help college tennis players monetize their name and audience; starting to build a documented athletic story and social presence before college enrollment accelerates NIL readiness

INTENNSE Relevance

• Cracked Rackets as broadcast partnership: Gruskin’s operation — press credentials, live broadcasting, daily content production, young audience — is exactly the kind of media partner INTENNSE should engage for its launch phase; Cracked Rackets already covers the tennis world that INTENNSE players come from, and its audience is younger than traditional tennis media consumers
• NIL and INTENNSE player economics: Project Elite’s architecture for connecting college tennis players to commercial value under NIL is directly relevant to how INTENNSE should structure its own player economic model; INTENNSE players are effectively in the same position as NIL-eligible college athletes — high-engagement athletic identity, limited commercial infrastructure, need for a bridge to brands
• Team tennis as fan retention mechanism: Gruskin’s identification of the team format as his emotional tennis core — and the Virginia men’s tennis YouTube evidence that team tennis filmed well creates obsessive fans — directly validates INTENNSE’s format premise; the fans INTENNSE needs to build are exactly the type of fan who responds to team tennis, not tour singles
• Daily broadcast cadence: Gruskin’s argument that diehard fans need daily content to stay engaged has a direct INTENNSE application; a league that plays on weekends but produces daily content (practice access, coach commentary, player stories) between matches will retain the tennis-obsessed early adopters far better than a league that produces content only on match days
• Young operators for tournament events: Cracked Rackets’ junior tournament model — younger operators who can relate to players, prioritize the experience over logistics, and create dialogue rather than just authority — is the model INTENNSE community events should replicate for its grassroots outreach; hiring young staff who are recent players themselves creates the authenticity gap that institutional events cannot manufacture

Notable Quotes

“I always felt comfortable in the tennis environment. Tennis players, particularly when you’re a junior, you speak a certain language.”

“A doubles partnership is like a relationship. I am still super close with every person I play doubles with in high school.”

“In 2017, there weren’t 500 tennis podcasts. There were like five. I just thought I could do it.”

“We had to go daily because I can’t do a weekly show that’s jammed in with 12 events from that week. If I don’t talk for two hours, we’re not going to hit everything.”

“Tennis was being run by people my age and older. There were not people who understood how to draw young fans into the sport — and y’all were it.”

“The 15-year-old dropped his racket and told the college kid exactly what he thought. I was shocked and kind of impressed. I was like, good for you. And then I was like, all right, both of you, bring it in.”