December Mailbag Part 2: An Ideal Tennis Calendar, Doping, and More

Teen droughts, nepotism concerns, doping tests, merchandising, disappointments and more—all discussed!

After posting the first eight question-and-answers a few days ago, I’m delighted to bring y’all the second half of your Bounces reader mailbag, which covers topics including a sudden youth drought, concerns about possible nepotism, my ideal tennis calendar, doping test thoroughness and doping suspicions, the PTPA and player merchandising, NIL in college tennis, and which players are most likely to bounce back in 2025 after disappointing years.

If you’d like to submit a question for a future month’s mailbag, you can click the button below or send an email to benrothenberg1+bounces@gmail.com.

NB: If you read Bounces primarily in your inbox, I’ve rewritten and updated my post from earlier today on Max Purcell’s positive test after he published a statement after I initially published.

And now, onto the mailbag!

From Colette Lewis:

There's only one teenager in the WTA Top 100 in the year-end rankings. Do you think this an anomaly or a trend?

Ooh, a question about the youths from the Queen of the Teens herself, this is quite an honor!

In some ways we are in a real youth moment at the very top of tennis; once Novak Djokovic withdrew, 28-year-old Daniil Medvedev was the oldest of the eight players in the ATP Finals field in Turin. Similarly, atop the women’s game, Jessica Pegula was the only player in her 30s at the WTA Finals, and the final saw 20-year-old Coco Gauff beating 22-year-old Zheng Qinwen.

But Colette is, of course, right: there’s a drop-off after 17-year-old Mirra Andreeva sitting at 16th in the rankings, with the next teenager being 18-year-old Maya Joint ranked a full 100 spots lower at 116th. Those are the only two teens in the WTA Top 140 currently, to use an odd cut off, but there are ten other 20-year-olds currently in that range so it’s a relatively sudden “drought” in the teen crop.

In the short run, my biggest question is: What happened to the Fruhvirtovas? Sisters Linda Fruhvritova (career high 49th) is still 19 and Brenda Fruhvirtova (career high 87th) is still 17, and they were both getting a ton of attention as teens on the rise. Both were in the Top 100 earlier this year, but both slipped far outside the Top 100 this year (at 195th and 178th currently, respectively). That’s odd for two balloons to burst simultaneously like that, and I wonder what might be going on that could connect their two stories.

They seem uninjured, at least: both sisters have been playing league tennis in France and Czechia this fall. I’ll be keeping an eye on them in Australian Open qualies next month and will keep my ears peeled for insights from Czech circles about them.

In the long run, my hunch is this drought will be short-lived: the juniors have gotten so professionalized that I expect more tour-capable players to keep rolling off the assembly line next year and in years to come. I’m most intrigued, with some American bias, by 17-year-old Iva Jovic, who seems set to be the American wildcard in Melbourne.

From Ab:

Should a player's father be allowed to own multiple significant tournaments including a mandatory one?

It seems like a ridiculous conflict of interest for Ben Navarro to own Cincinnati and Charleston. Even if there's no undue influence, I don't envy any Tournament Director who has to manage the appearance of impropriety.

While I believe the tour handles the actual application of rules (umpires, supervisors, etc.), scheduling seems fraught. Imagine that a rain delay means players are going to have a quick turnaround, and the Tournament Director needs to make a fairly arbitrary call of whether [Emma] Navarro plays first or her would-be next-round opponents do? Or deciding whether she gets to play earlier in a day with rain in the forecast.

I'm honestly surprised that I've seen absolutely no handling of this question in the media.

Ah, conflicts of interest in tennis, a reliably perennial topic.

It’s understandable that this one caught your eye, Ab: I don’t think we’ve had a situation like this in tennis in recent decades, in which a top player’s family had become so hands-on with the business of the sport.

I think it’s first worth mentioning that the Navarro family simultaneously holding these two prominent positions sport simultaneously was not something anyone really would’ve anticipated, at least outside the Navarro family.

When Ben Navarro bought the Charleston tournament back in 2018, he was foremost celebrated as a Charleston local who would keep the tournament’s place there secure. There was little indication at the time that his daughter would become one of the best tennis players in the world; “He and his wife are avid tennis fans and their four children play the sport,” the tournament’s press release on the sale mentioned in passing near its end. Even when Ben Navarro’s purchase of the Cincinnati tournament was finalized in the summer of 2022, Emma Navarro had only broken into the WTA Top 200 for the first time a couple weeks earlier.

But now that Emma Navarro has soared and finished the 2024 season at No. 8 in the WTA Rankings, it’s understandable to wonder about the possible conflicts the family’s two prominent roles in tennis could cause. So to get answers to your concerns, I reached out to the figure you mentioned (albeit not by name) in your question: Bob Moran, who serves as the tournament director at both the Credit One Charleston Open and the Cincinnati Open.

In his reply to the issues you raised, Moran first mentioned, rightly, that tangled business in tennis is hardly rare: Management companies frequently own and manage tournaments while also representing a select portion of the players who compete there, something that perhaps is most obvious to fans when looking at the wild card lists for the Miami Open each year, since IMG reliably rewards its clients there.

“I don’t see the relationship with Mr. Navarro as any different than IMG or Octagon that own multiple events throughout the world, and at the same time represent multiple players,” Moran said.

Moran emphasized that the decisions raised in your questions, which were about match scheduling, are in the hands of tour officials, not the tournament owners or tournament directors.

“We work hard to keep the competition aspect of the tournaments in the hands of the WTA and ATP supervisors who are on site,” Moran said. “They set the schedule, and the draw is a very public activity. Any play requests—like late starts, etc.—must go through the tour supervisors. After 26 years of doing this, I have a lot of great relationships with players and agents who make requests all the time; My simple answer is they need to take the request to the supervisor.”

Moran said that his feedback to the tour supervisors regarding the schedule is more about wanting “to highlight American players as much as possible in feature matches for our ticket holders and Tennis Channel viewers; that would be true with tournaments across the globe who will feature their home country players as much as they can.”

Where there are multiple interests at play, Moran added, has to do more between the officiating side and the television side. “When planning the schedule, the supervisors, TDs and representatives from both ATP Media and WTA Media sit in a room and cooperatively work on the next day's schedule based on both domestic and international viewership opportunities,” Moran said.

So there you have it: those sorts of decisions, Moran maintains, are ultimately in the hands of the tour officials, not anyone directly employed by a Navarro. There are other aspects of managing a tournament that you didn’t mention which are more at tournament owner’s discretion—wild cards being foremost of these. But if Emma keeps her ranking anywhere near where it is now, she won’t be needing any wild cards for a while.

But thank you for this question, I think it was a very worthwhile exercise getting more clarity on this topic from the source. And as Emma Navarro becomes more established as a relevant player on tour, for however long she can maintain that lofty status, hopefully these tournaments continue being similarly transparent whenever issues—or even the appearances of issues—arise.

From tm:

What would your ideal schedule look like for the ATP Tour?

Oh boy, this is an involved question. There are so many competing interests that go into making a schedule, even when trying to reconcile my own personal preferences.

How much do I want to curtail the overall season? How much do I want to keep the sport global vs streamlined? How much do I want to disrupt existing fixtures and traditions in the tennis calendar?

[If you’ve read this far I bet you’d like to keep reading! To read the answer to this question, and the answers to five more questions in this mailbag installment, please become a subscriber!]