Rogers Cup may not benefit from WTA master plan

The future of women's tennis is near, as the WTA Tour's Road Map 2009 plan finally gets implemented nearly five years after it first went on the drawing board.
 
It's a global initiative, sweeping in scope from corporate sponsorship to tournament venues, from player commitments to media strategy. It should provide a solid infrastructure, a concrete rule book, so to speak, for a business that didn't really have one.
 
WTA Tour president Stacey Allaster spent considerable time outlining it Monday, no doubt just one of many such briefings she'll hold before it goes into effect in January.
 
Her belief in the concept was unshakable. Her knowledge of its ins and outs was comprehensive. Her delivery was persuasive.
 
How it will all play out on the real stage will be a very interesting story for 2009.
 
At its core, the WTA Tour is its players. And it's in a very good place right now. The top tier is made up of very attractive, well-spoken, talented players of various shapes and sizes (even if they're all Russian or Serbian, they're very varied Russians and Serbians). The Williams sisters are still here. The adorable Ana Ivanovic is No. 1. And there's a whole new crop coming up.
 
The two major issues affecting Canadian tennis fans are these: how will the new Road Map get the players to show up here when they say they will? And how will the plan to run the men's and women's events concurrently, starting in 2011, affect the Canadian tennis landscape?
 
Allaster is uniquely positioned to answer those questions. Before joining the WTA in Jan. 2006, she ran the Toronto event for 15 years.
 
The women's event will see a 50 per cent increase in prize money in 2009. With that, comes a pledge to deliver seven of the top 10 players, up from six currently.
 
That's a minimal difference in the public's perception. They'll still hope for 10, would settle for eight. And even if you explained the Road Map to them a dozen times, that wouldn't change.
 
Allaster said each level of tournament will now know what to expect. More than once in the last few years, tournaments at a lower level than the Rogers Cup ended up boasting even stronger fields. That isn't supposed to happen any more.
 
What the WTA Tour has done is lower the commitment the players must make to better match the level of what they're actually playing in a season. Allaster called it "recalibrating," a nice corporate-speak term for lowering your standards to accept the inevitable.
 
Ultimately, it will be the tournament's job to manage the fans' expectations in that area.
 
The second issue is the combining of the men's and women's events. Combined events are successful around the world, and the WTA and ATP tours are working on adding more.
 
But the Canadian tournaments will be "virtually combined," which means the women will be in Montreal, the men in Toronto, or vice-versa, but will play the same week.
 
From a corporate point of view, everyone will be happy. Allaster said only five per cent of the fans at the two events overlap. But instead of tennis getting a high profile for two weeks a year, all over TV and the media, now it will be only be for one week, and split in half. Both events will be shortchanged in the public's perception. Tennis will be shortchanged. And the women risk getting the short end of the stick.
 
The matches on the men's side the first few days of the tournaments are, in a nutshell, more compelling. You just get the feeling the women will end up on TSN's alternate feed more often than not.
 
Since the announcement of the plan, a lot of good things have happened for the WTA Tour: the extension of Sony Ericsson as the title sponsor for two years, done a year before they even had to re-up. The addition of big events in Doha and Beijing. Hundreds of millions in new infrastructure planned to get the facilities at other tournaments around the world to the standard of Montreal and Toronto. Allaster credits all of that to the new Road Map.
 
But on the local scale, it doesn't seem as though the Canadian events are going to get a whole lot out of this.
 
Perhaps, in a way, the Rogers Cup is a victim of our own success.
 
Tennis is more of a global sport than ever before, so it stands to reason that what's good for the overall health of the women's game will eventually benefit the Rogers Cup.
 
That's thin soup. But that's the positive way to look at it. We'll see how it all plays out before drawing definitive conclusions.

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