That is the first thing anyone will say in the room, so here it is answered on the first page. What follows is a professional league in your own city, in a sport you have never been in, with an audience you do not currently reach.
A partnership proposal · about four minutes
“This one you can have fun.” — in the stands, Atlanta
A gender-balanced Professional Team Tennis League
Eight playing weeks in the middle of the summer. Switch the view to see the
same season against the American sports year, or against the college calendar our players come from.
INTENNSE Grand Slams Team events
INTENNSE Regular season Postseason
INTENNSE Regular season Postseason & championships
2026 season. INTENNSE: 5 June – 1 August, 58 days, one dark week for Wimbledon. Sources: data.intennse.com/2026/calendar.tsv; published tournament calendars.2026 calendar year. The NBA and NHL finished on 13 and 14 June; the NFL’s season opens 9 September; LOVB ran January to April. Only MLB is in season through INTENNSE’s eight weeks. Sources: published league calendars; INTENNSE figures from data.intennse.com.NCAA Division I, 2026 as it happened. Both the men’s and the women’s team championships finished on Sunday 17 May at the Dan Magill Tennis Complex in Athens, Georgia — Virginia over Texas, Texas A&M over Auburn. The NCAA has moved singles and doubles out of May: they are now a November event, so a graduating senior has nothing left on the college calendar at all. Basketball’s season opened in November 2025; the January football block is the 2025 season’s playoff. D-I carries 5,207 tennis players across 541 programmes. Sources: ncaa.com championship releases, official school schedules, NCAA Sports Sponsorship and Participation Rates Report 2024–25.
Where our players have been on the tour, and where they sit on the rating that
covers everyone. The orange rule is where tennis starts paying for itself.
Career high September 2026MVP race ↗ (second scale) alone = no tour ranking, placed by MVP standingName in yellow = straight from college
Rounds 1–3 of the 2026 draft, plus three players the draft board leaves out altogether and one fourth-round pick: 56 in all. Forty-seven carry an ATP or WTA career high. The nine below the dotted line in each panel have no tour ranking on record and are placed by where they finished in the league’s own MVP race — among them Sofia Cabezas, fifth in that race, and Corey Craig, thirteenth, straight out of Florida State. Two more carry a career high but no current singles ranking, so they show a career-high dot alone. Fourth-round picks are otherwise excluded — 2027 rosters are three women and three men. The one exception is John Chin, 19th of 31 men over four Arcs, ahead of eight higher picks including two first-rounders. A player placed by MVP standing needs more than one Arc behind the number: Season Score is the sum of a player’s best six rounds divided by six, so a single appearance is not a season. Ranking axis runs worst to best, left to right, as in the UTR chart below. The MVP race is a separate scale, and it stops at our own best-ranked player rather than running the width of the chart — it ranks these players against each other inside the league, not against the tour. Aliona Bolsova sits inside that line on both counts: a career high of 88, inside a Grand Slam draw, and first in the 2026 MVP race. A career high is never drawn worse than the player’s current ranking: where a recorded best is stale, the best is at least today’s rank and the two collapse to a single point. Tier cut-offs: main draw top 128 — the draw size of a Grand Slam — Challenger 129–350, ITF Futures 351–900 (the ITF renamed the Futures circuit the World Tennis Tour in 2019). The orange rule is the break-even ranking — where prize money covers the cost of competing. It is drawn at ~150, which is where a peer-reviewed 2026 study puts it once a realistic cost base including a coach is counted — and every professional has a coach. The faint rule behind it is the ITF’s own 2013 figure, 336 for men and 253 for women, which sits at a worse ranking only because those costs exclude coaching and all support-team expense. It is the bar nobody actually competes under. Against the real bar: of the 26 men here with a career high, all 26 never reached 150; of 21 women, 19 never did — the exceptions are Aliona Bolsova at 88 and Usue Arconada at 130. On today’s rankings it is unanimous: 25 of 25 ranked men and 20 of 20 ranked women sit outside break-even. Sources: draft.intennse.com, stats.intennse.com MVP race, intennse.com player pages, Tennis Abstract, retrieved 20–21 September 2026; ITF Pro Circuit Review, Stage One: Data Analysis, December 2014; Schöttl et al., Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 29 June 2026.
UTR: our players against the tour’s
INTENNSE player Straight from collegeTop three picks per team Tour band (10th–90th percentile)
Bands derived from 286 players who publish both a UTR rating and an ATP/WTA ranking, taken at the 10th–90th percentile of each tier. INTENNSE ratings: the top three men and three women per 2026 roster — 28 men and 30 women carry a rating on the league’s own draft board. Source: draft.intennse.com players board, retrieved 20 September 2026.
Down to the wire; Sudden Death
Two Arcs that finished a point apart. Each clip picks up in the closing minutes,
with the full Arc a click away.
Sudden death, level at 142
The final three minutes of Freeze v Rise, 20 June. The clock runs out with the teams tied, and the next point decides it: 143–142.
Six days of inventory. Sunday is brand only, and we have already priced it that way.
You are present at Sunday sport constantly and by choice — the Falcons and
Atlanta United, Major League Soccer, Major League Baseball, and Little League, whose championship
is played on a Sunday on ABC every August. You built a stand inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium knowing
it would be closed on every game day, and kept it closed for Super Bowl LIII, in your own city.
So the distinction is not between being there and not being there. It is between
operating and appearing. We have written the partnership around
that line rather than asking you to move it.
Friday and SaturdayFull inventory. Signage, broadcast, food service,
sampling, activations, ticket mechanics, player appearances.Two thirds of the season
SundayBrand only. Signage, broadcast, in-app and social. No food service, no
sampling, no ambassadors, and no Sunday-dated offer.Priced down accordingly
The finalMoved off Sunday. Your biggest moment of the season should not land
on the one day you cannot be in it.Ours to change, and we will
We are not asking for an exception and will not propose one.
■ What you do not have
College football in the autumn, and nothing else in the year.
The Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl is the longest currently-running title
sponsorship in college football and it is, effectively, the portfolio. It is also a
December–January property. For eight weeks in the middle of summer, the brand is not
anywhere.
Three other gaps sit alongside it, and they are unusual for a brand this
size: no tennis, ever, at any level. Almost no women’s sport. And no live sport
at all inside Chick-fil-A Play — an app you built to commission original
content for families, with no games in it.
July, in Atlanta
■ What this is
A professional league, in your city, built for families and for television.
Three women and three men on court for every team, sharing one cumulative score,
about an hour and forty minutes. A point won by a woman counts exactly what a point won by a man
counts. Forty-three matches in 2026, sixty-five in 2027, all of them carried live.
The ball keepers are the detail worth knowing. They are not staff — the
single-ball rule and the serve clock make them part of the competition and part of a team, so
they wear the jersey. It turns a child’s first afternoon on a professional court into a
whole family’s way into the sport.
60,000+ALTA members in metro Atlanta
9Sellouts in 2026
$52Average ticket
1h40mA complete match
■ How you actually buy sport
The Peach Bowl is not a football sponsorship. It is a charity with a game attached.
It gives away more money than any bowl in America, it has funded childhood
cancer research at scale, and that is why it has lasted twenty-nine years. Reading it as a
media buy misreads it entirely.
So the proposal is not an impressions number. It is a named, funded,
publishable programme: access to tennis for Atlanta children who have none
— court time, coaching, equipment, and a route through our Challenge Series, which is
open entry and lets any player enter and earn a place on a professional team the same
week.
The community programme
ALTA has 60,000 members in this metro and a ninety-year history here. Tennis in
Atlanta is not an elite sport. It is a suburban, family, weekly one — which is the same
description as your customer.
■ Content, not just signage
Chick-fil-A Play has no live sport in it.
You are commissioning original series, podcasts, games and a game show for
families, and buying none of the thing families actually watch together. A summer season of
sixty-five matches, with salaried athletes who are contracted to be there and available, is
inventory for an app that has none.
That is a different conversation from perimeter boards, and as far as we can
tell nobody else is bringing it to you.
■ The ask
An hour, and the Sunday conversation out of the way in the first five minutes.
We will bring the full inventory split by day, the community programme costed,
what each asset delivered in 2026 where we can prove it, and the shape of 2028 when teams move
into their own markets.