Plans to reintroduce a ladies’s match at The Queen’s Membership relaxation on convincing the ATP Tour the grass courts will stay in ok situation for the boys’s occasion the next week.
The LTA and the All England Membership need to stage a WTA match at Queen’s within the first week of the grass court docket season from 2025.
If the ATP may be persuaded then the highest ladies’s gamers could be gracing the courts of the west London membership for the primary time since 1973.
“Now we have received excessive confidence, and we’ve received important proof from the All England Membership as to how grass courts put on over a two-week interval,” the LTA chief govt Scott Lloyd stated.
“The grass courts at Queen’s are completely able to delivering two weeks {of professional} stage tennis. We have the information.
“We expect it might be nice for that swing of tournaments and for the ladies’s occasions, significantly from a visibility and profile perspective.”
The LTA says it has studied climate situations, the density of the soil and potential put on to areas of the court docket, such because the baseline.
However male gamers are understood to be sad concerning the prospect of beginning their week on used courts.
“The ATP are vital companions of ours and we’re working with them to strive to make sure that the gamers are glad and comfy that the floor can maintain use,” he continued.
“Sometimes gamers are fairly delighted to make it to the second week of Wimbledon and you do not hear them argue an excessive amount of concerning the court docket floor in that situation. We’re very hopeful that there will not be any points, however we’re working by means of the logistics.”
Logistics embrace the supply of courts for males who arrive early to practise and the influence on the ATP qualifying occasion which is held the weekend beforehand.
The ATP has been open to the concept of extra mixed occasions in recent times however must stability that with the desires of its members. Whether or not it has the authorized cowl to dam the LTA’s plans stays to be seen.
A ladies’s occasion at Queen’s would exchange Eastbourne as the only WTA 500 occasion staged within the UK within the run-up to Wimbledon.
Eastbourne would nonetheless host a mixed occasion however, as soon as the WTA occasion is downgraded to 250 standing, there will likely be larger restrictions on who can enter.
As a WTA 500 occasion is staged in Germany in the identical week, no top-10 participant could be allowed to enter Eastbourne – except they’re British, or the defending champion.
Not more than three top-30 gamers could be permitted in complete, and this at an occasion which in 2023 performed host to half of the world’s high 10.
“Eastbourne sells out and we have loved it over a really, very lengthy time frame as a serious match venue, however the actuality of that location is that it’s commercially restricted to some extent,” stated Lloyd.
“We simply assume that having a WTA 500 in week one, straight after Roland Garros, will elevate the profile of top-level tennis in that interval.
“It is not about trying to focus our tournaments in London. We’ll nonetheless completely help our different venues all through that calendar, and certainly as you see us doing with Davis Cup and Billie Jean King Cup – whether or not that is Glasgow, Manchester, Coventry. We need to have that geographical range.”
There isn’t a scope for an additional WTA grass-court occasion within the UK, and, because the LTA now owns the Nottingham Tennis Centre, it’s the match in Birmingham which is more likely to make approach for Queen’s.
The Edgbaston Priory Membership first staged a WTA occasion in 1982, when Billie Jean King received the title.
These discussions are going down as the game investigates the viability of a ‘Premium Tour’, which might create a sequence of extra unique tournaments. However as that may be a good distance from turning into actuality, different concepts proceed to be superior.