Inclusion & Access
Cost barriers, diversity, adaptive tennis, grassroots programs. The fastest-growing thematic cluster in the recent catalog and the one Lisa has been most explicit about wanting to expand.
What recurs: the five-thousand-dollar tournament weekend and the kid who never gets to play one, the African-American tennis communities that built themselves outside the official pipeline, the neurodivergent and adaptive players whose access depends on individual coaches rather than institutions, and the small but steady set of nonprofits trying to change the math.
The math of a competitive year
Erik Kortland’s Getting Creative to Grow Tennis episode is the catalog’s bluntest accounting of what a competitive junior year actually costs. Five thousand dollars in a week is not unusual at the elite level — coaching, travel, hotels, entry fees, equipment, the parent missing work. Erin Murray’s Making Jr Tennis Affordable episode (Jul 2024) approaches the same math from the nonprofit side. Murray’s rural Texas model is one of the few in the catalog that has tried to reconstruct the cost stack from scratch — group practice, shared coaches, regional rather than national tournament focus, parent volunteers replacing paid logistics.
"Tennis tells itself a story about how anyone can play. The math tells a different story. We have to choose which one is going to win." — Erin Murray, Making Jr Tennis Affordable (Jul 2024)
The honest editorial finding across this theme is that the cost barrier is not a fact of the sport. It is the result of a particular model — the private-coach, national-tournament, year-round-academy model — that took over American junior tennis somewhere between the 1990s and the 2010s and has crowded out almost everything else.
The Chicago thread
Two of the catalog’s most-loved episodes in this theme come from the Chicago South Side. Shelia Townsend’s 4 the Love of the Game episode (Jul 2022) documents the African-American tennis community Townsend has spent decades building — a community that has been producing competitive juniors and college players since long before the USTA noticed. Violet Clark’s She Loves to Serve episode (Jun 2023) is the team-based grassroots program Clark built in the same neighborhood, modeled on a sport-as-life-skills approach that the rest of the junior pipeline often abandons by age twelve.
The HBCU tennis episode (Sep 2022 legacy) sits alongside these as the catalog’s most direct treatment of the historical infrastructure American tennis has neglected — and the families who are still producing players through it.
Adaptive tennis, when the institutions are not built for it
Lisa Pugliese-Lacroix’s Love Serving Autism episode (May 2024) is the catalog’s centerpiece on neurodivergent athletes. Pugliese-Lacroix’s argument, made carefully across the episode, is that the sport’s existing structures — clinic schedules, tournament formats, coaching certifications — were not designed with adaptive players in mind, and the access that does exist is almost entirely the work of individual coaches who built it themselves.
This is the part of the inclusion theme that most resists structural reform — and where individual practitioners carry the most weight.
Coaching education as the bottleneck
Marcy Hendricks’ Future of American Tennis episode (Jun 2024) connects the access conversation to the coaching one. Hendricks’ work focuses on coaching education and on female coaches in particular — both, in her telling, are fundamental to expanding who the sport actually serves. The same structural problem that runs through Theme 2 — the absence of meaningful US coaching certification — shows up here as an access problem. Communities without certified coaches do not stay in the game.
Tony Minnis’ Beyond Xs and Os episode (Feb 2026) and Jim Harp’s Roots to Racquets episode (May 2025) both extend this argument: tennis as community infrastructure is a different project than tennis as elite production, and the people building it are mostly working without the support of the organizations that should be backing them.
What recruiting looks like from the outside
Shaquana Miller’s What You Need to Know to Be Recruitable episode (Jan 2026) sits at the seam between this theme and Theme 4 (College Pathway). Miller’s audience is explicit: the underrepresented family that does not arrive at recruiting with insider context, that does not know which tournaments coaches watch, that does not know what the showcase circuit costs and what it produces. The episode is one of the catalog’s most directly useful single conversations for any family on the outside of the standard pathway.
Pamela Ellis’ Unraveling College Admission episode (Mar 2024) plays a parallel role — admission as a navigable process rather than a black box, for families who do not have the network to demystify it informally.
The slow opening
The catalog’s editorial trajectory on inclusion has shifted over the past five years. The early years rarely treated inclusion as a standalone theme. The recent years treat it as one of the central organizing questions of where the sport goes next. Lisa has been explicit, in her own retrospective episodes, that this is the area she most wants to keep growing.
The hardest lesson in this theme is also the most consequential for the sport’s future: a junior tennis pipeline that only serves families who can spend five thousand dollars in a week is not a national pipeline at all. It is a private one. The families and coaches in this theme are the ones quietly trying to make it national again.