New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
For tournament director Worcester, work’s already started for next year
NEW HAVEN — When you are the tournament director of the Connecticut Open, you worry about both the players field and the gubernatorial field.
The players field was not kind to Anne Worcester in 2018.
We will see about Ned Lamont and Bob Stefanowski.
When she walks into a meeting with tournament directors from around the world Sunday morning at the Essex House in New York, Worcester figures to engage in spirited discussion about the circuit structure of the WTA.
Worcester attracted five of the top 10 players in the world, the best field in a dozen years. Yet one by one, pfft, they disappeared. After making the finals in Montreal and Cincinnati, an exhausted Simona Halep showed up in the parking lot of the Connecticut Tennis Center on Monday. That’s where the No. 1 player in the world told Worcester she was withdrawing because of a sore Achilles.
By 3 p.m. Monday, all four of the wild-card entries, including Karolina Pliskova, were gone. The news didn’t get better. Caroline
Garcia, the No. 2 seed, fell to Monica Puig in the quarterfinals. No. 3 seed Petra Kvitova, three-time New Haven champion, retired in the quarterfinals against Carla Suarez Navarro with a shoulder problem.
“Petra is the most loyal player to this tournament, she had only retired once in her career before Wednesday night,” Worcester said. “Her first words to me were, ‘I’m so sorry.’ ”
Monica Puig battled through qualifying, had growing support from the state’s Puerto Rican community. Yet there she was dissolved in tears in the semis against Suarez Navarro, writhing in pain with an abdominal strain.
Incredibly, Suarez Navarro played three full sets to reach the finals. She lost to Aryna Sabalenka, 6-1, 6-4.
“From a business standpoint, withdrawals and retirements are unfortunate,” Worcester said. “It’s not just our week. If you look at the women’s tennis tour, especially this summer, there have been too many withdrawals and retirements.”
Worcester is always at the forefront of promotions and the tournament managed to draw 50,255 fans (compared to 51,946, 51,724 and 50,599 the past three years). A lot just didn’t
break well, right down to local TV weather reports that called for washouts Sunday and Wednesday.
“Far more draconian than reality,” Worcester said.
The WTA has four Premier Mandatory events: Indian Wells, Miami, Madrid and Beijing. From there, a player must compete in four of the Premier 5: Doha, Rome, Wuhan, Montreal and Cincinnati.
New Haven is one of 12 Premier events. Players are required to play in two. Squeezed by the U.S. Open, obviously Worcester is in a tough spot. The Cincinnati champ last week got $530,000. By contrast, in her first WTA victory Sabalenka got $136,580.
“I would love to have a different week,” Worcester said. “There have been discussions with the WTA of possibly adding a few more Premier tournaments and maybe a week or two after Wimbledon would be a new week.”
Players tell Worcester they loved playing on the same surface, same climate, same ball, only a drive to their New York hotel for the U.S. Open. There is no shortage of potential players. The problem is accommodating the best ones.
The WTA, Worcester said, would love for her to have a 56-play draw and would likely stop trying to find an alternative event for this week if she had a main draw of 48. No thank you, Worcester said.
“The WTA needs more jobs, not less,” said Worcester, who pointed to international events at Dallas and Louisville that didn’t work going against New Haven.
Worcester needs the best possible field. She would have loved to have maintained the main draw of 28 with four byes, with the ability to give a worn-out top player off until Wednesday. As a concession to the WTA, New Haven has gone 30 and two byes, with a qualifying field of 97.
“We did have two nights of Legends,” said Worcester of John McEnroe, Tommy Haas and James Blake, who played after the retirements of Kvitova and Puig. “I’ve never said ‘Thank God for the men’ so much in my life.”
Players overextending themselves in an 11-month season is always a hot topic, yet as she enters Essex House, Worcester doesn’t believe it will be the hottest. She said it will be the 32 international events — “minor league events,” Worcester calls them.
“We have too many on the WTA tour with a playdown rule that is nowhere near as strong as it needs to be,” Worcester said. “Players should only be able to play down to the international level in very specific, discrete situations. Right now it’s too easy for too many top-10 players to play down.”
Worcester said a tennis purist would insist the biggest players need to play on the biggest stage and those are the premier events. Whether it’s easy prize money or proximity, that’s not the way it always works and it lends to more wear and tear on the players.
“The WTA says it wants our tournament to be strong and healthy,” Worcester said. “The international events have too many rights. It’s the biggest challenge to improve the circuit structure of the WTA tour.”
One person whom Worcester can’t praise enough for trying to keep the tournament strong and healthy is Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. In 2013, when the tournament almost was sold to Winston-Salem, N.C., state government stepped forward to buy it for $618,000.
“We would not be here today without Gov. Malloy,” Worcester said. “I know he may not be the most popular governor in the history of the state ...”
But he gets the $10 million economic impact, she said, the job creation, the community outreach program and the attention it brings Connecticut from around the world. Worcester said WTA tournaments are sold for $8 million to $10 million these days and Malloy saved it for a fraction of that. The Connecticut Tennis Foundation, restructured as a nonprofit, manages both the facility and tournament. The place was massively overbuilt in 1991 for 13,000 fans. Yet at the same time not enough for a video board and infrastructure for sponsors, catering, etc.
There was $2.5 million in bonding approved for money-saving improvements and to make it a year-round facility. The state subsidy has been reduced to $250,000 this year with the goal of being self-sustaining by 2020. Corporate sponsorship accounts for 75 percent of revenue that was in excess of $6 million in 2016. Half the 75 sponsors are from Connecticut.
All those numbers scream for a terrific players field.
“I’m watching the governor’s election very carefully,” Worcester said. “We were in and out of the budget. Both sides of the (state legislative) aisle came together at the very last minute and said ‘We have to reinstate the tournament’s funding.’
“Ned Lamont was here this week. There happened to be an extra seat next to him in the stands. I found my way there. He was very supportive. He’s actually a big tennis fan. I’ve just got to find Bob Stefanowski now.”