Three Years Ago, I Picked Up a Tennis Racket. The Data Says I’m Not Alone.

Three years ago, a friend invited me to join her weekly tennis clinic. Minor detail: I was six months pregnant at the time. I showed up, swung a racket for (almost*) the first time in my life, and then didn't come back for another six months.

But I kept thinking about getting back to a clinic. Until I finally did a few months after giving birth. And I haven't put the racket down since.

Turns out I'm not the only one. The data is pretty clear on this.

The decade-long slide nobody was talking about

Tennis in America had a quiet erosion problem through most of the 2010s. At its modern peak around 2009-2010, roughly 26-27 million Americans were playing the sport. Then, steadily and without much fanfare, that number shrank.

By 2019, the Physical Activity Council (PAC), the gold standard for sports participation measurement in the U.S., counted just 17.7 million players. A loss of roughly 9 million participants over a decade.

Now here's where it gets a little nerdy, and worth paying attention to if you're looking at the data yourself. If you chart tennis participation over time, you'll see what looks like a cliff between 2013 and 2014: the headline number drops from around 24 million to 17.9 million in a single year. As someone who works with data for a living, that kind of single-year drop is an immediate red flag.

And it should be. That cliff is largely a measurement artifact. Before 2014, participation was tracked primarily by the Tennis Industry Association using its own methodology, with a broader definition of who counted as a "tennis player." When the PAC became the unified measurement standard, with stricter definitions and a more rigorous sampling design, the number was re-baselined downward. The PAC even flags this directly in its documentation: prior data trends may not be comparable to newer reports due to methodology changes.

The real decline was more gradual. Core players, people playing 10 or more times a year, held relatively steady at around 9.5-10 million throughout 2013-2019. The erosion was happening in the casual fringe: people who played a handful of times a year and gradually drifted toward boutique fitness, cycling, or a Peloton in the garage. Rising club costs, no breakout American men's stars, and a general sense that tennis was a sport your parents played didn't help. The sport was slowly aging out of cultural relevance.

What COVID did, and why it stuck

In 2020, something shifted.

Gyms closed. Team sports shut down. Group fitness evaporated. Tennis courts were among the first things to reopen because the sport is basically built for social distancing: you're on one side of the net, your opponent is on the other, outdoors, no shared equipment. It was almost perfectly designed for the moment.

The result: 3.9 million new players in 2020 alone, a 22% surge. The USTA counted 21.6 million players by year-end.

The more interesting part is what happened after. Pandemic participation booms are supposed to fade. People try something new during lockdown, life goes back to normal, they move on. For youth tennis, that's exactly what happened: the under-17 cohort peaked at 6.9 million in 2021 and pulled back 14% by 2023 as schools and team sports reopened.

Adult players 35 and older did not follow that script.

Six consecutive years of growth. 27.3 million total U.S. players in 2025, a new all-time record that finally cleared the old pre-decline peak. In the most recent year, adults 35 and older drove 95% of all growth.

The 35+ women story

This is the part I keep coming back to.

Women have been specifically called out as "significant drivers of growth" in each of the last two USTA annual reports. In 2025 alone, 1.1 million more women picked up a racket, a 10% year-over-year increase that outpaced the overall 6% growth rate. The 35-44 age cohort grew 13%, adding 488,000 players and setting a record high for that segment. And those two trends overlap: the women and the 35+ adults driving growth are, to a meaningful degree, the same people.

What makes this more than just a participation number is what happens after people start. Overall player retention hit 80.4% in 2025, the highest rate in five years, meaning eight out of ten people who played in 2024 were still playing in 2025. The number of core players, people logging 10 or more sessions a year, hit a record 14.5 million. And here's a detail worth sitting with: the average age of a core tennis player is 43. Not 23. The people most committed to the sport, the ones showing up week after week, are solidly in the demographic we're talking about. This isn't a wave of enthusiastic beginners who discovered something during lockdown and quietly moved on. They stayed.

A sport that found its second act

What strikes me looking at this full arc is that tennis didn't just recover. It transformed.

It shed the country club image and the dependency on professional stars to sustain mainstream relevance. It became a community sport, something adults in their 30s, 40s, and 50s can pick up at a neighborhood park, join a casual clinic, and build a weekly social ritual around. The infrastructure followed: neighborhood court usage rose 25% between 2020 and 2022, and the USTA has committed $10 million in facility grants to meet the demand.

The USTA has a stated goal of 35 million players by 2035. Based on six straight years of growth, record core player counts, and a demographic tailwind of adults actively looking for exactly this kind of sustainable, social, physical activity, that goal looks less like marketing ambition and more like a reasonable projection.

I started playing because a friend asked. I kept playing because I fell in love with it. Turns out 27 million other Americans had some version of the same experience.

The racket is staying.

* Ok I played in a couple week long summer tennis camp when I was ~8, but that doesn’t count!

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Data sources: USTA U.S. Tennis Participation Reports 2022-2026 (PAC + PLAY studies, n=36,000/year); TIA 2022 National Participation Report; PAC methodology documentation; USTA published MSA search interest rankings.