Getting Creative to Grow Tennis

Summary

Erik Kortland — former Reno-area junior, college tennis player, minor pro experience, eight-year USTA national coach, now player development consultant for racket manufacturer Tecnifibre and co-founder of RKT3 — joins Lisa Stone to discuss structural challenges in growing junior tennis and the multi-pronged approach RKT3 is taking to address them. RKT3 (the three founders: Kortland, Ryan Redondo, and Kong Tian — an attorney who is also a tennis parent) is a hybrid organization that works with tennis facilities, junior coaches, families, and sections to bridge gaps in funding, education, court access, and programming. The episode covers: the $5,000-per-tournament cost reality for national-level junior tennis, the shift away from country clubs toward Parks and Rec and section-funded centers, the over-coaching problem (kids being told what to do and never developing independent tennis thinking), and the role of parent education in making kids more self-sufficient between coaching hours.

Guest Background

Erik Kortland grew up in Reno, Nevada — a small market within the Northern California section — where he played junior tennis driven primarily by park-based peer play. He played college tennis, played briefly as a professional, then transitioned into the entertainment business before returning to tennis through coaching. He was hired by the USTA when Patrick McEnroe (then head of player development) rebuilt the national coaching program, where Kortland’s first role was running a community tennis feeder program in New York: affordable group programming for ages 9–13 (three kids per court, three sessions per week) with mental skills, strength and conditioning, and tennis components. Alumni of that program include players who went on to D1 scholarships. After eight years, Kortland resigned when Martin Blackman restructured the national coach role into a supplemental model supporting private coaches rather than direct programming. He now consults for Tecnifibre while co-building RKT3.

Key Findings

1. National Tournament Travel: $5,000+ per Family per Event

Kortland identifies the most acute accessibility barrier with specificity: a single national-level junior tennis tournament can cost a family $5,000 or more — flights, hotels, tournament fees, and coaching coverage for the week. He contrasts this with the ITF junior circuit: players at appropriate levels can play three to four international tournaments consecutively for similar or lower total cost, often with housing subsidized by the tournament. The cost disparity is a structural problem that drives talent attrition at the point where junior players attempt to compete at the national level.

2. The Country Club Collapse and the Parks and Rec Opportunity

The traditional junior tennis infrastructure in California (and nationally) was built on country clubs. Kortland observes that these clubs are being torn down at accelerating rates because the land is more valuable for real estate development. The replacement opportunity: Parks and Rec facilities and section-funded multi-court centers (examples: the proposed Kimmelman Center in LA, Texas section centers, New England section development). The new business model for coaches at these facilities is likely a concession model — coaches bidding for RFPs (requests for proposals) from public parks rather than being staff at private clubs. RKT3’s role: help coaches build the business and foundation infrastructure to operate in this new model.

3. The Over-Coaching Problem: Kids Who Can’t Think For Themselves

Kortland names a developmental failure he observed in his USTA national coaching work: players who are coached so intensively and directively that they lose the ability to problem-solve independently on court. His framing: “You’ve got to go after it and work on these things — too many of these kids today are being told over and over what to do and they can’t think for themselves.” He cites the decline of informal peer tennis play — kids calling each other to hit at a public park, organizing their own matches without adult facilitation — as both a symptom and a cause of this over-dependence. His development model: one lesson per week from a coach, then the player’s own responsibility to arrange and complete independent work.

4. Parent Education as the Leverage Point

Kortland’s prescription for enabling more match play without increasing tournament costs: educate parents to become active practice facilitators between coaching sessions. For families in geographically isolated areas (Midwest, outskirts of major metros), RKT3 provides: hand-feeding drills parents can run with their child, journaling protocols that the coach assigns and parents facilitate, and virtual/Zoom-based coordination for families who can’t access high-density training environments. The goal is to make the coaching hour the input and the parent-facilitated work between sessions the output, rather than requiring paid coaching for every practice session.

5. RKT3’s Hybrid Model: Facility + Family + Foundation

RKT3’s three-founder design (Kortland bringing coaching/federation expertise; Ryan Redondo bringing facility GM and foundation experience from Barnes Tennis Center in San Diego; Kong Tian bringing legal expertise and a parent’s perspective) covers the three domains the founders identified as lacking coordination: (1) facility operations and programming; (2) family/player education and navigation through the junior development pathway; (3) fundraising and foundation structure that can subsidize programming for underserved families. The organization works with sections (USTA Southern California, Texas, New England) on their center development plans, not just individual facilities.

6. Pickleball as the Competitive Threat and Comparative Model

Kortland identifies pickleball’s surge as a direct function of what tennis has failed to deliver: a game that is easy to learn, affordable to access, space-efficient (multiple courts per tennis court footprint), team-friendly, and fun for a wide age range. His prescription for tennis: more team formats (round robins, UTR team events with guaranteed matches), shorter events with higher match volume per dollar spent, and greater focus on informal social play rather than structured individual development. He frames this not as a crisis but as a strategic opportunity to redesign the tennis access model.

7. The USTA Community Feeder Program Model

Kortland’s most successful USTA initiative — the New York feeder program that produced multiple D1 players — had specific design features: capped at three kids per court (high teacher-student ratio), three sessions per week, affordable pricing through community subsidy, a mental skills component, and a strength and conditioning component integrated with the tennis curriculum. The program was geographically embedded in the community rather than requiring travel to a central academy. Players who graduated from it — Louisa Chirico is named — reached D1 and beyond. Kortland frames this as a proof of concept that affordable, community-based tennis can produce elite players, but the model was ultimately deprioritized when USTA shifted national coaching to a supplemental private-sector support role.

Actionable Advice for Families

• Ask your child’s coach for specific between-session assignments — drills you can run as a parent, journaling exercises, self-arranged match protocols — to increase training volume without increasing paid coaching hours
• One private lesson per week plus self-organized practice (peer hitting sessions, informal matches) was the development model that produced an entire generation of strong players before the over-coaching era; reclaim this model
• For families in smaller markets, pursue cross-club match arrangements with the coach’s help — remove the assumption that same-club hitting partners are the only available training partners
• Track both total cost and matches-per-dollar when planning tournament schedules; for players at the right level, a regional ITF junior cluster may provide equal competitive value at lower cost than a single US national event

INTENNSE Relevance

• Market infrastructure awareness: Kortland’s description of the country club collapse and the Parks and Rec / section-funded center shift is intelligence about the facility infrastructure in INTENNSE’s target markets — cities where traditional club tennis is declining are simultaneously building new public tennis infrastructure that creates natural community partnerships
• Accessibility and fan pipeline: The $5,000-per-tournament cost that drives talent attrition in junior tennis creates a pool of capable players who stopped competing due to financial barriers — INTENNSE’s salaried team model is, in part, a downstream solution to this problem; players who couldn’t sustain individual tournament costs may find a team professional environment viable
• RKT3 as partner organization: RKT3’s work with USTA sections and tennis facilities in California (and nationally) positions it as a potential INTENNSE community partner in key markets — helping identify emerging talent in non-traditional facilities and building fan communities at public tennis centers
• Team format alignment: Kortland’s explicit endorsement of team tennis formats and guaranteed-match events (UTR team events, round robins) as the competitive format innovation tennis needs maps directly to INTENNSE’s team competition model; his framing validates the format choice from a growth-of-the-game perspective
• Parent education model: RKT3’s parent education framework — teaching parents to facilitate practice between coaching sessions — is a model INTENNSE can replicate at the community level in its 10 markets: structured educational programming about professional tennis for parents and junior families, delivered as a fan-building and development-supporting initiative

Notable Quotes

“A family could spend $5,000 or plus just for one week at a national tournament. You could go play three or four ITF tournaments in another country for maybe the same price or less.”

“Too many of these kids today are being told over and over what to do and they can’t think for themselves. How many times do kids call each other up and just go out and play on their own? There’s no free play anymore.”

“You got to grow the game and you got to make it affordable for everyone to be able to play. I think that’s probably the reason why you’re seeing such a huge surge in pickleball.”

“Everything is so organized and overspecialized — can these kids just go out and play? I grew up in a local park system where everyone just showed up and said, hey, you want to play today?”

“The biggest thing starts with parent education. We need to get all these parents together and say, it’s okay for all the kids to play together.”