WE WANT THE MONEY RETURNED NOW! USTA By Javier Palenque

Last week I visited a gallery in Miami Beach, where I recently saw the bike pictured above from a local artist. I asked the artist what she tried to represent. She said, “It means if you do not pull in one direction, you go nowhere”. I immediately thought of the leadership of the USTA after she said those words. This work represented vividly and clearly how I see the work of the Ol’ boys club in our sport for the last 20 years.

If you are familiar with anything, you know that to achieve something one must pull in the same direction. Take for example what pickleball is doing, everyone there from the top down pulls in the direction of growing the game. Read this beautiful article about an investor that goes to prisons to teach the sport he loves. The only formula he uses is GIVING and not caring to receive anything in RETURN. This is like planting good mustard seeds as the bible teaches those who believe and read it.

The exact opposite is what we have with the USTA leadership, which understands a nonprofit to mean, TAKING and not GIVING. Contrary to what any teachings instruct. The Ol’ boys bunch have been controlling the game for decades, and they still hide real participation numbers. In the last 990 I checked; each director receives around $25K — $40K per year for a few hours of work per year. Well in the last 15 years at…