Tennisplayer Partners
with Tennis Channel!

John Yandell

It’s another major announcement for us!  Tennisplayer is now partnering with the Tennis Channel, and TennisChannel.com! 

We’ll be sharing some of our amazing content with TennisChannel.com. In addition we will be doing a major direct response advertising campaign on the channel, including all the major events in tennis.  If you watched the Australian Open, maybe you’ve already seen the ads.  Click on the movie above to see one of our two ads so far!

It’s all geared to spreading the word about something you already know about: this thing called Tennisplayer and its ability to bring the world’s best coaching and teaching information directly to you every month--and the power of our mulit-media format. 

Especially if you have been a subscriber since the beginning, I think you are going to enjoy being on the inside and watching us grow and seeing more and more people from all areas of the game recognize and appreciate what we have. Hopefully that won't include too many of your opponents that you may be dominating with the Tennisplayer advantage.

Founder Steve Bellamy (left) and new driving force, Ken Solomon (right).

Tennis Channel History

I’ve always been a fan and a supporter of the Tennis Channel, every since my friend Steve Bellamy, the founder, started haranguing me about how great the channel he was going to create was going to be for tennis.  Some people--ok a lot of people--thought he was crazy. 

But whether he was or not, the Tennis Channel is here now and is opening a whole broadcast vista that was simply not available previously.  If you love tennis and really want to follow the game, it’s a must at so many levels.  I know that sounds like pr, but it’s what I believe.  I have it on everyday in my office.

When Steve left, another visionary entrepreneur named Ken Solomon took the reigns, a man with a big time background in television programming marketing and distribution, and under his leadership the reach and the significance of the channel has grown exponentially.

I had a chance last year to spend a couple of hours with Ken at the Tennis Channel offices in Santa Monica.  He was and is thinking big, and has acted upon that thinking with significant result.

How so? The Tennis Channel is now covering all four of the Grand Slams.  The Australian Open coverage was extensive and a great compliment to ESPN2, especially because it provided time and commentator options. 

And just wait until the French, because Tennis Channel is the one and only cable channel there.  That’s right, you have to subscribe if you want to watch the French round by round.  So if you doubted me before, now you know it really is a must.  Don’t know about the rest of the country but in San Francisco it’s less than $5 a month extra on the cable box.

I also really appreciate Ken’s understanding of our high speed filming and what it ha contributed to coaching and playing.  In fact, on the Tennis Channel website you can still see a one-minute clinic I did that was broadcast extensively, on the pro one-handed backhand. Click Hereand then look to the left and Click Video Archive and then Topspin Backhand.  

It’s really worth checking out.  Believe it or not, I pared down that massive 6 part series on the One-Hander on Tennisplayer to under a minute.  That was a challenge for sure and a lot fun. And I look forward to doing more cool stuff with the channel’s talented web and broadcast teams as we go along.

Brad Falkner, liaison to the tennis industry with a grass roots feel.

Ken has also surrounded himself with important key people, one of the most important of whom is Brad Falkner.  Brad is the Tennis Channel liaison to the tennis industry. Brad's work, and especially his instincts about tennis, are providing the channel with tremendous grass roots feel and authenticity.  He is a former college player who kicked my ass repeated at Indian Wells last year.  (OK, not his biggest wins.)  But he is also a classic tennis geek and he and I spent about an hour in Santa Monica doing nothing but looking at high speed footage of Roger Federer frame by frame.

One of the things that has come out of that grass roots perspective is the new Tennis Channel Academy series, which gives you a close look at how some of the great name coaches operate, including Robert Lansdorp, Pat Etcheberry, and Nick Bollettieri, among others.  

I can’t really argue with those choices as they are all long term Tennisplayer.net contributors.  But there was another interesting segment with Carlos Rodriguez (who has also expressed his interest in writing for us) which included Justine Henin.  Justine gave an extended analysis of her own famous backhand.  It was fascinating because some of what she said matched what she did perfectly, while other things did not.  I've seen that with so many other pro players. Carlos was also excellent and you got a feel for who he was as a person and why he and Justine connected and now continue to work together at their academies.

Tennisplayer contributors on the new Tennis Channel Academy show: Lansdorp, Bollettieri, Etcheberry.

I think it’s a credit to what we are doing on Tennisplayer that we have been able to forge partnerships with two of the absolute flag ship media companies in our industry, first Tennis Magazine, and now the TennisChannel.  So far both have been truly win/win. And that’s not all, because we have a couple more equally big and equally exciting announcements right around the corner. 

What does it all mean?  Well, that maybe the world of mainstream media is discovering what some of our subscribers have known for a long while.  Stay Tuned!