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DAVIS CUP BY BNP PARIBAS WORLD GROUP FINAL: SPAIN v CZECH REPUBLICNovember 18, 2012Dave MileyFrancesco Ricci BittiJerry SolomonPRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC THE MODERATOR: Good morning. Welcome to the press conference where we will be launching World Tennis Day. Can I just introduce Dave Miley, the ITF executive director of development; Francesco Ricci Bitti, ITF president; and the president and CEO of StarGames, Jerry Solomon. If I could ask Francesco Ricci Bitti to say a few words of welcome. FRANCESCO RICCI BITTI: Thanks and good morning to everybody. We are here and I will say a few words. We say a few words to announce a new initiative that will focus the attention on our world of tennis on participation. The ITF has different roles. As you can imagine, we have the role to organize Davis Cup. We are here for that. We have the role of being the guardian of the rules and the integrity of the game. Last but not least, and perhaps the most important role linked to our nature of international federation and national federation is to grow the game. We are acting in this activity very seriously, according to our possibilities. I mention two projects that are showing the commitment of the ITF in this field: Tennis Play and Stay, and Tennis 10s, which is obviously a project to make our sport more accessible to the kids with a lighter ball, smaller racquets and more courts. Now today what we want to announce is that when Jerry Solomon came to us and asked us to share his vision to focus participation on events he was organizing, and intends to organize more and more around the world, we share this vision totally. We are very happy to say in 2013, the year of the centenary of the ITF, we are very old as you know, we are getting old, and in this year we have a very special event in many major countries. Many countries have embraced this initiative. So I close my introduction to say and wish Jerry and all the people in the ITF working together to make this event focus on how important it is to attract young people more and more to our sport. I will ask Jerry and Dave Miley to tell you a little bit more about World Tennis Day. Thank you. JERRY SOLOMON: Francesco, thank you. It is really an honor for me to be here with the ITF, who has, as Francesco says, really picked up on this vision that we started actually five years ago in the United States with the help of Lucy Garvin, who is here, and John Vegosen, of the USTA. We took that to the ITF and started talking to Juan Margets about this a couple of years ago: the ability to marry up the professional events that we put on around the world, and will be expanding, and tie them into a grass‑roots program to promote 10‑and‑under tennis, Tennis 10s, is something that is very important to us and we think an exciting initiative. We envision this day in the next few years where on World Tennis Day we have several professional events taking place in major capitals around the world, along with the whole world participating on the grass‑roots level. We've really patterned it after what we have been able to do in the United States. We started this in 2008 in the U.S. in conjunction with our BNP Paribas Showdown in New York. In the first year we had 200 tennis clubs and tennis facilities in the United States participate. Last year we had over 2,000 tennis clubs and tennis facilities in the U.S. participate in Tennis Night in America. We've sort of taken that as a blueprint and now we hope to take that around the world. We can envision a day where we have four, five, six showdown events around the world in major events, and five, six, seven thousand tennis facilities around the world participating in World Tennis Day with kids all around the world participating and experiencing tennis, hopefully catching the love for the game, for the sport, which will help grow the game all around the world. That's what World Tennis Day is all about. We're excited about it. We think it has the chance to be something special for the sport. Again, we thank everybody at the ITF, the USTA, all the various countries and Federations, for their support of what we're trying to do. Really looking forward to working with you in the coming years. THE MODERATOR: I'll hand it over to Dave Miley to say a few words. DAVE MILEY: Thank you. Obviously, more players is a very important part of development, and around the world we are trying to get more people into this great game. 10 years ago the ITF started working on this. We set up a task force on participation with experts from around the world. That led to the development of the Play and Stay Campaign. That campaign was about positioning tennis as easy, fun and healthy. The program that came out of the Play and Stay Campaign was the Tennis 10s program. We're very happy with that program. It's been adopted by over 160 nations around the world. You can see what's happened in countries like the U.S., France, et cetera, where we have 10‑and‑under kids playing on smaller courts with slower balls. In 2010 we managed to change the rules of tennis to make it actually a rule where you can play with the yellow ball in 10‑and‑under tennis. This task force has always thought that a World Tennis Day could be a great idea for tennis, on one day where clubs around the world would open up their doors to new players. We're happy to cooperate with Jerry and the events that are going on that day. On March 4th next year and the days leading up to that day we see clubs around the world in many of the nations opening up their doors and running Tennis 10s programs. It was very interesting this week when we started to approach some of the nations, we saw countries like you'll see in the press lease, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil in the Americas. We saw South Africa in the Africas. We have India very much interested. And in Europe some of the big nations. We're sure we're going to be many of the nations activating. I think the global impact we can have when every country around the world on the day are opening up their doors and really trying to get across the message that the game has changed, tennis is a little bit different now, hopefully it's easy, fun and healthy. And the slogan of the campaign, which is Serve, Rally and Score. Once people get out there, we all know we all get hooked to the game. It's great. Jerry, we're looking forward very much to working with you and making this day a big success. THE MODERATOR: Questions, please. Q. Jerry, would you share with us some of the players you've had in the past and you're planning on in the future to help create the kind of excitement you've been talking about. JERRY SOLOMON: We're now going into the sixth year of our event in Madison Square Garden. By not necessarily design, but what has happened it's become an event that unless you have been either ranked No.1 in the world or won a Grand Slam title, you don't end up playing. So we intend to try to keep that level at all of the showdown events that would be part of World Tennis Day. As we look to 2013, at the Garden on March 4th, we will have Azarenka playing Serena Williams, and Del Potro playing Rafael Nadal. That's been the kind of event we've had in the past. Last year we had Sharapova against Wozniacki and Federer against Roddick. We also had that night the benefit of having the No.1 golfer in the world come out and hit a few balls, Rory McIlroy. Every year it's been that kind of field and we look to do that same kind of thing at all the events all around the world. Q. What happens if anyone here or anyone who hears about World Tennis Day is chatting to a committee member or a manager of a club and says, What are you doing for World Tennis Day next March? The person says, I don't know, what's that? What do they do? How does one get involved in doing something at club or facility level? DAVE MILEY: Well, the plan is, as we've done with the Play and Stay Campaign, is go to the nations, try to get the various staff in those various nations to buy into World Tennis Day. They use their normal networks to get down to the clubs and to get them to do things. Probably the first year we're not going to be too prescriptive, but we're certainly going to try to encourage them to do a 10‑and‑under program. We also want them to try to do some adult things. Basically it's an occasion to get the Federations to buy in, that clubs open up their doors and the coaches are running programs for 10‑and‑unders and for adults, trying to get people into the game. So there is a network out there. We've seen it with the Play and Stay Campaign. We produced the documents, launched the programs. But we depend on the national associations to get behind it, to translate it to their languages, to make it applicable to their nations. The idea is they will use the World Tennis Day logos and be able to piggyback onto the global stuff that's going on that day, including the events that Jerry will be running. It may take time to get the huge momentum going, but even in five or six days of approaching nations, people are excited about it. They see ways they can take their existing programs, match it with World Tennis Day, and really drive it forward. I'm very optimistic that's how it's going to work. It will filter down to your question. The guy in the club in Britain or in Norway will eventually be contacted by the Federation and told, Listen, on this day, here are the logos, here is what you can do, try to run some programs which are good for attracting new people and hopefully retaining them in the game. JERRY SOLOMON: We are today launching WorldTennisDay.com. This is the site where people will go to get information, and will tie them into the ITF site, various sites around the world, and there's one place they can get all this type of information. Q. Can you talk about some of the benefits this event will bring to parts of the world where participation and the development of the game needs improving, maybe in parts of Africa. What kind of benefits do you think this could have? DAVE MILEY: That's a good question. I think, for example, the 10‑and‑under program, one of the challenges in many of the nations that are coming up is the lack of tennis courts. What we see with the Tennis 10s program, in a school area you can have 20 red tennis courts, the 36‑foot court setup. We've seen unbelievable stuff.  Argentina is not a developing country, but where they take a main street of Buenos Aires, hundreds of kids playing, sponsors involved. Even small countries in Africa which are able to promote tennis and get it into the schools. That's the kind of thing that's made a big difference. It's interesting to look at a tennis court. You can get actually 16 kids sometimes playing on one tennis court with the red if you put enough courts down. The area is actually about half the area you need for five‑a‑side soccer for kids. We're beginning to compete with a sport like soccer in an area you need to play. Obviously there's a bigger picture, that the kids have to have somewhere to go and play. Through the ITF program, we're trying to encourage Federations to build more courts. Through the Grand Slams and the ITF, we have funding to try to do that. This is the first step to try to get people into the game. JERRY SOLOMON: One other thing on that. We will be incorporating the ITF development program into the events in an effort to try, through some of the events we're doing, to raise funds for the development program, then it would be up to the ITF to take those funds and distribute them to the kinds of countries that you're talking about. Q. If we fast forward, in 10 years' time, do you think we'll see more African players at the top of the game? Do you think it can have that kind of impact? DAVE MILEY: Many of you know we're doing a lot of work in Africa on behalf of the ITF. We have three training centers in African, one in South Africa, one in Dakar for Francophones, and one in Burundi. We're looking to set up one in Morocco, which is close to Europe. There have been some good examples. Ons Jaber from Tunisia winning Roland Garros juniors. She's doing very well. There's a boy from Burundi in the second round of junior Wimbledon, Burundi being one of the poorest countries in the world. The challenge for Africa, for the players, they have to play lots of competitions. To be a good player, you have to be playing 70 to 100 good matches a year between the ages of 15 and 20. That's a challenge. To travel around in world tennis is expensive. That's where we're doing a lot of work as well. We're trying to create more competitions in Africa. It is working. There's a lot more in Asia and Africa than there were many years ago. There's a lot of factors involved. We're optimistic there will be good players coming out of Africa in the future. Q. Jerry, could you talk about the kind of television coverage there will be of World Tennis Day, and especially discuss how much coverage there will be of Play and Stay so the world gets to see that format. JERRY SOLOMON: The vision for television is to have a full day of television around the world.  The professional events will be put in locations where we actually follow the clock around the world. So if you think in terms of New Year's Eve where you might watch the fireworks go off in Sydney, then a couple hours later you see it in Tokyo, then you see it somewhere else, finally it comes around to New York. That's sort of the model of what we're trying to do here. The television will be worldwide. We will look to have a full 24‑hour cycle of television coverage which will not only show the events but also show things that are going on around the world related to World Tennis Day. We have done this in the United States in our programming for the BNP Paribas showdown in New York. Every year we do cutaways to things that are going on around the country at these various clubs where they are promoting Tennis Night in America. We're going to use that same basic format around the world. We know, for example, that already in the United States on World Tennis Day we will have a full day of programming on the Tennis Channel starting at 6:00 in the morning, going till midnight, and it will all be dedicated to World Tennis Day. We hope to use that same format around the world. FRANCESCO RICCI BITTI: To add a comment about participation, I want to give you some numbers. The International Tennis Federation did a survey in '88, 75 years of the ITF. This survey was based on some criteria of frequency of playing, talking about 18 million players around the world. We repeated this exercise in 2008, and the situation is that we are between 80 and 100 million. So we need to continue, because the competition, being an Olympic person, I can tell you the competition on young people is bigger and bigger, not only between sports, but also between pastimes. It means if we don't work very hard in the development, the grass‑roots, to make our sport more attractive, we risk that this trend, which is obvious, because tennis was coming in the '70s in developed countries an exclusive to a popular sport. It was to some extent easy to risk not to go forward. But we have to work very hard and that is an opportunity. DAVE MILEY: One of the big things we've been looking at in tennis is adapting the product of tennis to the customer. We all know that the lifestyles around the world have changed in terms of time available, et cetera. All the time we're looking at what the customer needs and then trying to adapt our sport in terms of competition formats. Sometimes they're shorter, in terms of the court, in terms of making it easier for people. That's a big objective. It's like any company: we have to make sure that the customer gets the product that suits their needs and lifestyle. Q. Are there any other activities from the ITF's side to celebrate this anniversary? Do you have any plans for changes in the rules of tennis or in the calendar in the recent future? FRANCESCO RICCI BITTI: I can give a general answer. I'm not really the person that can tell you. But we have many, many occasions which we celebrate. This one is the first. As you have seen, we start with this final, even if we are still in 2012, because it is the 100th final of Davis Cup, which to us was very significant, even if the Davis Cup is 112 years of age. Surely we will continue on many occasions. During the year, in Paris we have our gala dinner. Obviously this year it will be special because we celebrate our centenary. Then we meet with the general meetings of the ITF, not randomly in Paris, but because the ITF was founded in Paris in 1913. So we go back to Paris. Then we have the Fed Cup final, that is 50 years of the Fed Cup. In January we have the 25thth anniversary of the Hopman Cup, another competition we control. I am not sure I've been totally complete, but we have a lot of initiatives. There is a program obviously to focus on the facts that our organization is 100 years old and focus on the contributions that our organization has given to our sport, especially in terms of being a guardian of the rules, the integrity of our sport, of the attractiveness of our sport. Perhaps I missed something. But if you want, you can ask more detail about this program. The calendar is an ongoing issue in professional tennis. We are only a part of the professional tennis. Obviously there is a tour, the Grand Slams, major stakeholders in this question. We try obviously to find solutions throughout the year to find all these components. Also, rules are very important. We have continuously monitored the input about the rules of tennis. As I said many times, many occasions, I was interviewed on this matter, we don't need to change what is working very well. I think basically the scoring system works very well in tennis. I believe that we should not change for changing. We obviously have to evolve according to the requirement of tennis. Tennis has become more physical and tougher. But in terms of rules in itself, tennis has very good rules. If you look at the book of the rules, they have already included a lot of new possibilities that for the moment are not exploited but could be one day with the consensus of the players at the top level, adopted. There are rules like short sets, no let. Now we change, for instance, the professional game, they play doubles in all the tour tournaments with a third set as a long tiebreak. That's a big change. So we have changed things every year. In general, the set of rules of tennis is very good. DAVE MILEY: One of the changes made that can have an impact on this program, the green ball, a 25% slower ball for a two‑year trial, is now available to be used at all levels of play on a national level, which means at a club, the players can play with a ball that's easier to play with. At the end of a two‑year period, the Rules of Tennis Committee will be looking to see whether that should be brought in on a full‑time basis. Obviously something that can at club level make it easier for people to play, give them more enjoyment, could be very big from a tennis participation point of view. JERRY SOLOMON: One thing you will notice on the courts at the showdown events that take place, they will have the 10‑an‑under lines on them so that we can use that as a vehicle to explain to the world what 10‑and‑under tennis is really all about. We've done that for the last two years in New York and will continue to do that throughout the course of these professional events that are part of the World Tennis Day. Q. We hear increasingly a lot of talk about a change in the Davis Cup format. First is the pressure on players. Second is to make the event more attractive to nations not participating, for instance, in the finals and so on. What is your view on that and what are the prospects? FRANCESCO RICCI BITTI: My view is that Davis Cup in our opinion is attractive enough, as you have seen here this weekend. We don't need so much to worry about the attractiveness of the competition, first. Secondly, there is obviously a Davis Cup Committee that is considering all the time continuously, all input coming from many parts. Perhaps what you mention is one of the considerations that the Davis Cup Committee is taking onboard. But before changing something that is working very well, we have to be very, very conscious, obviously, considering all the pros and cons. I believe the attractiveness is very high. We are in a good shape. Obviously we have to listen to all the input, and we changed many things, not so relevant, but we change continuously something. We changed the rule for the last match. I'm not obviously the major expert. But format absolutely is the best format we can have, if you talk about the format of the match in a tie. If you talk about general formats, there are many considerations, and I can assure you that the Davis Cup Committee and the board of the International Tennis Federation, we are very, very conscious about that. We consider every day input. Q. A question about participation. How important is it to forge a link between inspirational events like this and the BNP Paribas Showdown and actually getting racquets into kids' hands? DAVE MILEY: We've talked about this a lot in our task force. We look a lot at what makes a healthy sport. We think what makes a healthy sport is people playing the game. Because they play the game, they want to watch the game. And because they play the game, they want to buy things that help them play better. So they want to buy coaching, racquets, et cetera. That's a healthy sport. The challenge is that we have people playing and we don't have tennis people watching. We want people playing the sport and watching it. So there's a huge link. Obviously, the top players are a pull effect. You see Federer, Nadal, people want to play, or Sharapova, because they're their idols. But you also have to have programs that push people into the sport. So it's a pull‑and‑push effect, but both are important. I think events like Davis Cup, Fed Cup, professional events, where the top players are playing, are important, but it's important to link as well to the participation program. Q. Jerry, can I get your thoughts on that? JERRY SOLOMON: I think it's critical. I think that kids fall in love with various things when they're very young. If they have a chance to see the top people in that particular endeavor, I'm not only talking about tennis, it could be music, drama, anything, you hear so often the top performers in various areas say, I fell in love with that the first time I saw it when I was four years old and I knew I wanted to be such and such. I think the same is very much true with tennis. I think by linking the grass‑roots with the professional, it gives an opportunity for kids to have that experience. So the more we can create that experience, the more places we can make that experience possible, the more chances you have to have some little kid fall in love with tennis. THE MODERATOR: Thank you, everybody. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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