Tennis Atlantic

I didn’t say it first, but the Inaugural CitiOpen at College Park, formerly the Inaugural Mid-Atlantic Women’s Tennis Championships, is not exactly a social-media juggernaut at this point. Their website is a really bare-bones affair, their Facebook page is rarely updated and tweets are rarely answered. They might be the only tennis tournament on Twitter following more people than they are being followed by. On Facebook and Twitter, they proudly proclaimed on July 7th that the CitiOpen would be held “next month”. Never mind that the whole thing will be over before the 1st day of August.

TennisMaryland made the obligatory call in late May and asked about kid’s events. Y’know, we called the main number of 202-721-9500. The same one they answer for the highly-organized, social media-managed Legg Mason Tennis Classic.

We were told that Kid’s Day was most likely going to be on Saturday, July 23 and that an official announcement was forthcoming.  When we called back in mid-June, we were told that there was a meeting about special events going on as we were speaking and that an official announcement was forthcoming.

No announcement ever came forth.

The worst part is that the USTA Smashzone bus (which is a Kid’s Day on wheels) that roams all over the country was available for that Saturday when the USTA started planning its route. It turns out The Asian Food & Tennis Festival in Fairfax, VA will now host the Smashzone bus tour on Saturday, July 23. So, they had a shot at a free turn-key kid’s day operation and didn’t get on it quickly enough. 

We’re now eleven days away from that phantom Kid’s Day and the Qualifying Rounds.  

Still, I “Kid” you not.

We are very excited about this tournament!

So much so that we had to go to Maryland.usta.com to find the player field.  It looks like a good field. Stanford this is not, but for DC, it looks great. And  the venue is beautiful, TM having attended the US Open Sectional National Playoffs there at the end of May. While we were doing deep research on the “most secretive event in history’, we noticed that USTA members get in free on Monday, July 25, for the first-round main draw matches. That session begins at 3pm as there is also a 10am quallies session on Monday.

TennisMarylanders listen to DC radio and read DC websites, too, yet we haven’t heard of any kind of large-scale promotions of this event. You can’t count the crawler listing all of the tournaments on Tennis Channel.

Ticket sales are disappointing to date.  How do we know this? Because if you go to Ticketmaster.com, you can still get the very ‘best’  front row center bleacher price-level seats for almost any session.

 Ticketmaster directs you to the “best available” seats, so when Sec. 203 Row G, Seats 1-6 come up, you can infer that no one else has purchased bleacher seats for that session. Check it out for yourself if you don’t believe us.

So, if you want this event to succeed, show up and tell your friends. If you want to enjoy your own private WTA tournament, show up and don’t tell a soul.

UPDATE 7/12/11  at 1:00 p.m. EDT @CitiOpen has responded to our twitter question, and they indicate that there WILL be a 2011 CitiOpen Family Day. We will be there and we will update this post when the information becomes available.