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ROGERS CUP WOMENAugust 5, 2014Stacey AllasterMONTREAL, QUEBEC STACEY ALLASTER: Bienvenue. It's always incredibly special for me to return home to the Coupe Rogers, to Tennis Canada. I must say as a Canadian, this is a dream come true, to have Canadian tennis and to have such ambassadors like Milos, Vasek, and Eugenie Bouchard at the top of the game. To see the passion and the energy, this event is going to break a record. It's the largest single week women's event on the WTA Tour. It's phenomenal what they've accomplished here. It really is special for me to be home. Q. You're already aware it's going to be a record broken? STACEY ALLASTER: Yeah. Eugene and the entire Tennis Canada team do a fantastic job at presale. The tickets for 2005 Coupe Rogers are on sale. When I was at Tennis Canada, we were doing about 25% to 30% of next year's sales during the event. Hopefully with the success of this year's Coupe Rogers, both in Toronto and Montréal, it will even go even further. Q. How much do you think Eugenie has made a difference in tennis in Canada? STACEY ALLASTER: Massive. You have to look at the TV ratings. Three Grand Slam semifinals. I'm inundated during the French, Wimbledon. I could feel the buzz from afar. Then I had all my family members saying, How cool is it having Eugenie Bouchard on the WTA? Q. She's mature for her age, a great ambassador. STACEY ALLASTER: She's a very mature, very confident, smart young woman. When we think of the world that we live in ‑ the sports/entertainment world ‑ there's a lot of pressure, a lot of media attention. To be a star, it's not just about her on‑court performance, it's how she's handling herself off‑court. What I love the most about Genie is she understands at the end of the day is that we're here for the fans. She really engages with the fans. We just have to look that the Genie's Army has flown here from Australia to support her here at home in Montréal. They'll do the same if she makes it to the WTA Finals in Singapore. Q. Serena said yesterday for sure Genie is the future face of tennis. What fun if that rivalry clashes in the quarterfinals? STACEY ALLASTER: That would be an amazing match. I think for the WTA, the last couple of years, we've had a mix of the established stars and the rising stars. The rising stars have come in, but they haven't been able to sustain their performance. What we have seen this year is Simona Halep, she has had a full year, going to be No. 2 in the world. Eugenie Bouchard, three Grand Slam semifinals. No player has had that record. She believes she will make it. If she makes it to the quarters with Serena, that will be a fantastic match for Canadian tennis and the fans here. Q. The Road to Singapore, Eugenie is top eight in the rankings. STACEY ALLASTER: With the WTA Finals, the year‑end event, the top eight players in the world competing for $6.5 million. They win the WTA Finals, they're making as much as they do at a Grand Slam. This event will be for the first time in Asia, in Singapore. We've opened an office in Singapore. It is the financial driver of the WTA. It actually represents 35% of our net operating revenues. So we need to make that event a strategic priority. When we sold it to Singapore, we said to them, You're not buying a six‑day tennis tournament, you're going to buy a 43‑week, year‑long promotional campaign that will start on January the 1st and will take us through till the end of October. We said to them, We're going to deliver you $150 million with media value and economic impact. This is the first time in our history that we have connected the season and the road that brings together the umbrella of the tour. We've added more events. We have expanded it from a six‑day tennis tournament to a 10‑day sport and entertainment spectacle and created new content. WTA legends will come home to the WTA Finals for the first time. We've announced Martina Navratilova as the first active player to play in that event. The WTA Rising Stars, this will be a new event, Invitational, under 23, for those athletes that aren't going to make the finals, but are on the horizon to make the finals, we want to build them as stars through this journey while we're in Singapore for five years. It's going to be two from the rest of the world and two Asians because Asia/Pacific is our big bet for growth. We want to profile the Asian players. What we're going to do on the second Tuesday of the US Open, by rank, under 23, we'll have a list of who is eligible. We're going to then have the fans vote. That will take us through the Asian swing so we can really ramp up this Rising Star tennis promotion. Another new aspect of the Finals which I'm really proud about, WTA Future Stars. For the first time in the WTA's history, we will introduce an under‑14 and an under‑16 junior program. They will be in 10 markets throughout Asia. We want to make the Finals Asia/Pacific's Finals. We'll have Junior Road to Singapore. We'll have a winner from each of those 10 countries. Those young future stars will come to the main event. They'll be on the same stage as Maria and Serena and Genie Bouchard. We feel this is a fantastic way for us to help develop the sport in Asia, to give back, to empower these young women. And we may find a diamond in the rough. Q. What is the last date that one can qualify for the Road to Singapore? STACEY ALLASTER: It can go right up until the last event. So Moscow, Luxembourg. It's based on results. What usually ends up happening, qualification usually around the US Open, we'll start to see for sure Player X, she's surely going to make it. What happens here, what happens in Cincy next week, what happens in New York, we'll be defining for the first four or five spots for sure. Q. A question about some of the elder stateswomen here. We have Kimiko Date, Martina Hingis, Venus just won, Mary Joe Fernandez still playing. STACEY ALLASTER: Fantastic to have her, to have Venus, our modern‑day Billie Jean King. She's been a leader with the WTA. I'm so pleased for all the fans of Québec to see such a great champion, got that match in today. The WTA, I'm so fortunate in that I have athletes that are playing when they're 16, 17, 18, and now they're playing when they're 33 and 34. They're as jazzed about winning and as competitive today as they were then. This nice competitive tension between the rising stars and those established stars makes for great play. Q. We didn't see this before in previous eras, players playing in the mid to late 30s. STACEY ALLASTER: Well, the WTA over 20 years ago introduced a rule called the Age Eligibility Rule. That came off of some of the issues we had with some of our young athletes like Jennifer Capriati, Andrea Yaeger. We used a group of medical experts to help us, how we take young kids and put them into an adult world. Each year when they're 14, they can play so much WTA tennis, stair‑step, 15, 16, 17. We have an entire player development team that works with them to help them through this transition. So what has happened, the average career length prior to the rule was 12 years. Now we can see the average is 15 years. I think the other thing combined with the rule, smart scheduling. If we look at Serena and Venus, we all might have not been happy that they didn't play 16, 17 WTA events in their 20s. But they were really calibrated as to how much they could play. So now how great for all of us that they were so smart, as is Maria. We know they play around 10 WTA events a year, play the slams. They might play a couple additional events. That model is also why I think we have Venus and Serena and Li Na still on the court with us today. Q. What will the WTA do that Eugenie Bouchard is an established star? How important is it that she becomes an established star for the WTA? STACEY ALLASTER: We're here to help. Most important, it's all up to Genie. I can just tell you, she has the champion gifts. She has this mental capacity that I see in the likes of Serena and Venus and Maria. She's got good composure. She loves the pressure. I'll tell you, last year at the French, I saw her. You know, I said, Hey, good French Open result. She looked at me and she said, Stace, I lost. Yeah, but you lost to Maria Sharapova. She said, I lost, Stace. It starts with this champion‑like confidence that on day one she's planning for Sunday. There are only a handful of champions that have that attitude. Others are happy they made it to the quarters. She's not. So it starts with her. I have to tip my hat to Nick Saviano. He's a brilliant coach, has her grounded, has her focused. This is a long marathon. This is not a sprint. He's calibrating that, giving her space. She needed time off after Wimbledon. So I think he's just a great coach. Tennis Canada has done a wonderful job at supporting her for what additional services she needs. There's a good infrastructure there. I tip my hat to her fans. Q. You say it's a plus that she has a lot of charisma, she's a crowd‑pleaser. STACEY ALLASTER: She's a fan favorite. We're in the business of fans. Genie understands that. What I'm trying to teach our athletes is that they're not just sports women, you are sport entertainers. Genie understands that. I don't have to teach that to her. She has that natural instinct that is there. She's embracing the fans and the fans are embracing her. Q. Have you seen anything like this Genie's Army phenomenon? STACEY ALLASTER: I haven't seen a Genie's Army specifically. Q. There have been some players who have been popular. But this is a bit of a phenomenon. STACEY ALLASTER: I think the Australian Open is one of the funnest slams. We can see that with the Genie's Army here. But they're here. If Genie makes it to Singapore, we want to bring the Genie's Army there. This notion of fan clubs I think is really a good dimension to add to our sport. It's an individual sport. We don't have teams. But you can almost create your teams within it. As for Singapore, we're going to go to eight different schools or clubs and we're going to have a fan team associated with each of the eight athletes who qualify. That makes for great engagement in the stands, good ambience, and us making that close connection with the local community and the local fans. Q. Why such a push in Asia/Pacific? You don't think maybe you could downgrade Europe and North America? STACEY ALLASTER: We are a global sport. It is our goal to continue to be a global sport. 1973, there were 14 events primarily in the United States. Now 2014, we have 54 events in 33 countries, 14 in the Americas, 17 in Asia/Pacific, and 23 in Europe. We want to continue to build upon the foundation in the mature markets. We want our big events like Coupe Rogers to get bigger. But without question, just like all global brands, you need to grow your business. Where can we have really significant growth? That is in Asia. So it's about calibration. The uniqueness of our product is that we actually have to follow a particular circuit structure because of the four slams. You can't just manufacture and go to Asia. The nice thing with the opportunity we have now post US Open, we'll have for the first time in our history a bona fide Asian swing. The athletes can go and play Tokyo, Wuhan, Beijing. If they want to stay they can play Seoul, then they can slide into Singapore. It's been a fantastic opportunity for me. So fortunate to have Li Na as a catalyst. 2008 we had two events in China. 2014, we'll have six premiere internationals. Next year we'll have seven. There's so much demand, we created a new level of product, $125,000 event, and we have four of those in China. So now we have the scale. Just like when we built the sport, we had scale to build the popularity of the sport. We have an office there, a team on the ground. This is truly about maximizing a global world and building upon the mature markets that are well‑established to drive the growth of the sport, but also looking to the future. Q. Talking about how they build this event, do you feel there are times you undervalue your product? STACEY ALLASTER: What do you mean? Q. The men are playing for 50% more money this week in Toronto. You probably have as attractive an event as they have. STACEY ALLASTER: We have eight of the top 10 and 41 of the top 50. That's our promise to Tennis Canada. They deserve it. You guys deserve it. Those fans deserve it. So does Rogers and Banque Nationale. Q. You don't think Tennis Canada will give you more money? STACEY ALLASTER: It's how the system works. I've been a tournament director of a Masters Series event and a Tier I. WTA combined with the four slams has 10 equal prize money events. Where we have equal product, same number of athletes on the court, it should be equal. The structure and the difference between the two Rogers Cups, for the men it's a mandatory event, they must play it. Supposed to be 10 of 10, barring injury. Our commitment to Tennis Canada on the women is seven of 10. It's not mandatory. It's almost mandatory because we have five events in this class, and the athletes have to play four of five. We haven't had Serena on a regular basis or Venus. So where we don't have the commitment of equal, we can rationalize that it's not equal prize money. Would I like them to pay equal prize money? Sure (smiling). Q. Toronto I think they have eight of 10. STACEY ALLASTER: And so do we, yes. Q. But they're getting more money. I know you're trying to keep all the tournaments equal, but it seems like in a situation like this you could get more money. STACEY ALLASTER: Look, if a tournament wants to volunteer and pay increased prize money, we welcome that. Our tournament, we have a few tournaments that pay above the minimum. I know that Kelly Murumets is just new on the job. I can confirm we've had a conversation. But the business models are different. They get more international television. I need to generate more revenue for Tennis Canada so we can have that meaningful conversation. No question, it's on Kelly's radar. International TV rights, there's the difference. It's part of my job to increase the international television rights, sponsorship, so that Kelly has more revenue in the pipeline to justify. It's not just about the domestic gates. Q. (Question regarding Eugenie and taking a break.) STACEY ALLASTER: I was happy she took a break. It's hard to take a break. When we did the changes in the circuit structure, we created a mid‑season break. They are out of gas after the clay, after the grass. So good on her. Again, good on Nick to help her with that. It is all about scheduling. We designed it because now you play Canada, Cincy. Some didn't get enough matches, play New Haven, go into the US Open. Another break, then it's the sprint to the WTA Finals. I don't need one‑hit wonders. I need a sustained product that's competitive with rivalries. We're really lucky. 10 different nations in the top 10. National heroes in big markets helps to drive the popularity and will help drive those TV revenues. Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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