Chairman of the Board of USTA you got some explaining to do… By Javier Palenque

This month is the 40th month ( 3 + years) in which I have been writing trying to get the USTA to listen to a different point of view on how to grow the game, since then I have been part of podcasts, articles, opinion letters, interviews etc. all over the world. My network in the tennis world went from a few friends to presidents of federations, famous journalists and famous world class coaches, top 100 players not to mention thousands of tennis lovers overall. I guess they all found some common sense of the need of accountability and can relate to the need for change of the unproductive “status quo”. My mission is really simple, to grow the sport of tennis and to shed some bright lights to the incompetent USTA executives and board and provide solutions before the game is a footnote everywhere. In this three year journey, my social media accounts have been blocked by USTA, my email has been blocked by USTA ( forbidding me to engage their employees or their employees engaging me), I have applied to be a board member and was denied under the absurd response that “they simply had too many applicants” so much for diversity, do they realize that intelligence is not a color of skin?
I requested a formal meeting with the board, I was told by then CEO Katrina Adams that: they don’t need help and that the growth of tennis is assured by the executive team, yet there are no numbers to support her claims. This really means, we don’t want intelligent people discovering what we can’t hide and be shamed for it or lose our high paying jobs under the false claim of being a non profit. Life is good, go away.

This month I had to go to Bethesda Maryland for a business trip and while getting to my destination I saw many empty courts, so as my driver was taking me to my meeting I decided to look at the Mid Atlantic section of the USTA. After a few minutes reading the financials, I needed to go to the bathroom and asked the driver to please stop at the next McDonald’s, I had just gotten sick reading the report. Let me caution you that maybe you should read the next lines in the bathroom or with a decency nausea bag next to you.