‘Game, set, matchmaker’? The US Open gets into the dating game
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People crowding the Billie Jean King National Tennis Centre during the US Open semi-finals in New York on Sept 12, 2024.
PHOTO: KARSTEN MORAN/NYTIMES
Alisha Haridasani Gupta
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NEW YORK – Last week, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) made an unexpected announcement. The US Open, one of the sport’s four Grand Slam tournaments, will be inserting itself in the saturated world of reality-show dating.
The announcement raised a few eyebrows and set off widespread online chatter that is best encapsulated on Instagram by women’s professional player Donna Vekic, who said: “Wait what?”
According to a statement from the USTA, the tournament will host its own reality series, set at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Centre in Queens. The eight-episode series, called Game, Set, Matchmaker, will be filmed the week before the Aug 24-Sept 7 tournament. It will air on YouTube during the event.
The bachelorette at the centre of the series is Ilana Sedaka, a “tennis-savvy” 24-year-old former figure-skating champion and pilates teacher, who was born and raised in Long Island and now lives in Miami.
She will be matched with seven men, and will go on dates that will include playing games and exploring the tennis centre. A contestant will be sent home at the end of each episode.
“My hope is to bring a little joy, a little chaos and a whole lot of realness to the court,” Sedaka said in a news release. The USTA did not divulge how Sedaka was chosen or share any details on the male contestants.
The decision to film a dating show – and the sponsorship it drew from Dobel Tequila and Moet & Chandon – illustrates that, at the end of the day, “sports is a business”, said Marsha-Gaye Knight, an assistant professor at the Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport at New York University. Prof Knight added that “sport and culture are very intertwined”, whether that is tennis, basketball or football.
“Let’s be honest, a lot of people watch tennis because Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are there,” she said.
Basketball star Stephen Curry, actress Tina Fey and Vogue’s global editorial director, Anna Wintour, all attended the 2024 US Open.
The other Grand Slams, which are held in London, Paris and Melbourne, consistently draw their own star-studded audiences, too. And celebrity fashion choices at the games become social media catnip for their fans, Prof Knight said.
At a moment when shows like the Love Island franchises, The Bachelor and Love Is Blind seem to have overtaken cultural conversation, putting on a dating show is an attempt by the USTA to bolster the sport’s cultural cachet beyond tennis purists.
“We are trying to attract an entirely new audience, reaching fans at the intersection of tennis, pop culture and entertainment,” a spokesperson for the association said in an e-mailed statement.
The USTA has also been trying to boost participation in tennis. According to research conducted by the association, one in 12 Americans – about 26 million people – played tennis in 2024, which is the highest it has been in five years.
That makes it among the most popular sports in the United States. Recent research found that 28 million Americans play basketball and just over 15 million play baseball.
Despite that level of participation, professional tennis still draws a far smaller viewing audience than American football and basketball in the United States, according to a recent market research report, and Gen Z, Prof Knight added, simply is not watching sports on television as much as previous generations.
“The US Open realises that for them to appeal to new audiences and tap into new sectors, they have to go where audiences are,” Prof Knight said. “Audiences are no longer chasing sports; we have to now chase our audiences.” NYTIMES
