I'm Making Room for a Bigger Question

Say national junior tennis destination and most people picture courts. Rows of them. Maybe a stadium. A parking lot full of minivans on a Saturday morning.

I understand why. I've run tennis facilities myself. But the longer I think about what makes a place matter to a sport, the less sure I am that the answer starts with what gets built.

For a while now I've been asking what it would take for Central Texas to become a place the whole country knows for junior tennis. The region already has good players, coaches and tournaments. The better question is what Central Texas could add to the future of American junior tennis that isn't already happening somewhere else.

I've been in player development since 1992. In that time I've built programs and watched kids figure out what competition means to them. Along the way I learned the setting teaches too. A tournament spread across scattered sites teaches a family one thing about the sport. A tournament where everything fits together teaches another. Kids notice whether the adults around them seem rushed or settled, and whether a match feels like a verdict or a step. They carry those lessons into how they handle pressure long after they stop playing.

I've also watched communities decide who they were going to be.

When I moved to Frisco in 2008, the city had about 100,000 people. The RoughRiders played at Dr. Pepper Ballpark, FC Dallas at Pizza Hut Park and the Dallas Stars headquarters and practice facility were already there, so a sports identity was taking shape. The Dallas Cowboys built their headquarters at The Star. The PGA of America left Florida after decades and made Frisco its national home. Both came out of partnerships between the city and private organizations. What I want to understand is what Frisco had done before those deals to become a place organizations like that wanted to be.

Before Frisco, there was Atlanta. I was coaching junior players there in the mid-1990s, while the city got ready to host the world. In 1987, a local lawyer and former Georgia football player named Billy Payne decided Atlanta should bid for the 1996 Summer Olympics. He had never been to an Olympics. Atlanta's mayor, Andrew Young, was less hopeful than Payne's circle and backed the bid only if it wouldn't cost the city serious money. Three years later, Atlanta won. The bid took real work, and so did getting business, civic and political leaders to commit to an idea before anyone could promise it would succeed.

Two cities took two different paths. I want to know what Central Texas could learn from both, and what it shouldn't copy.

Starting tomorrow, I'll work through those questions in public. The series is called The Case for Central Texas. Every Monday, Wednesday and Sunday through December 30, I'll look at the infrastructure, economics, history, institutions and partnerships involved. I'll start with whether the opportunity exists, move to the evidence, and only then ask what it would take. Twenty-three essays in all.

I'm not announcing a project, a site or a fundraising campaign. I do have some ideas about where this could lead. A few are ambitious, and I'm not ready to argue they're all right. Before I ask anyone else to believe in them, I want to find out whether the opportunity is as real as I think it is. I expect some of what I find to argue with my own assumptions. When it does, you'll read about it here.

My regular Performance Architect essays stay on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Fridays now belong to my Hansel Posts, the breadcrumbs that don't fit anywhere else. Seven days of writing, but not seven days of the same conversation.

Here's where I need help. If you've worked in sports development, city planning, tournament operations, philanthropy or building institutions that outlast their founders, I want to hear from you. The same goes for parents, coaches and educators, and for families who've spent a weekend inside a big junior event. You know what already works, what needs fixing and which changes aren't worth making. Tell me what I'm missing. Tell me where I'm wrong. You can reach me at [email protected].

Courts are easy to count. What a community becomes around them is harder to measure, and that's the question I care about. Whether the answer even starts with courts is one of the things I mean to find out.