You're Not a Tennis Freak if You Haven't Checked out TennisEarth Yet

Thursday October 11, 2012 , 3 min Read

Here’s a startup that would provide a textbook definition for the word **holistic**. As far as the name **TennisEarth** goes, one could probably assume safely that this is a venture that is obsessed with tennis. Wholesome being its approach, TennisEarth encompasses any and everything a tennis fan, a budding player, a tennis club or even a tournament organizer would want.

Starting off and team composition

“We’re a massive platform for tennis comprising of and targeted at all possible stakeholders including players, coaches, associations, clubs and most importantly,we use the base of the entire structure as fans,” emphasizes Nitin Jain, who looks after operations in India.

Starting off in 2009 at Gurgaon, the team of 20 includes 7 from the design and development division and 5 from the content team. “Besides me, we also have a 3 member sales team, a Product Manager, an HR manager and a couple of external clients,” adds Nitin.

What they’re all about

Let’s start by serving up an ace. TennisEarth is one of the few places where you could catch live point-by-point commentary from a host of the big and the not-so-big tournaments. Also available on cellphones, the site is updated with all the latest articles and news updates a tennis fan would need as fodder.

Another unique feature is TennisEarth’s **self-developed player ratings system** that is comparable to the lofty standards of the official ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) ratings. Preferring to follow a **quantitative** ratings system, where-in a lot of performance statistics are considered, the ratings, when put into practice at a recent tournament, were successful about **77%** of the time in predicting the winner, scoring a significant 5% over even the ATP ratings.

Probably the clincher though, and a certainly interesting concept, is the one that connects the entire tennis ecosystem online. A player X, if interested in improving his ratings, could find a similarly skilled player Y on the site’s database, book a court in a preferred location and thereby play a match that would be tracked by tennisearth’s ratings system.

Another salient feature includes the Tournament Management System, where-in one could use the site to create, organize or find a new tournament, the statistics and schedules of which, wouldall be recorded. Plus, there is also the provision of creating, searching or booking tennis clubs online.

Challenges faced and a look into the future:

“The aim is to ultimately be recognized as an e-commerce player for tennis clubs, targeting a percentage on transactions that are processed for every court booked through our website,” says Nitin. The marketing strategy is centered aggressively around social media, with major Facebook and twitter interaction.

Scaling up and being visible to a larger crowd base is one of the foremost challenges that TennisEarth looks to counter. Given that the company is all of three years old, and competition on such a large scale level is not a major worry, it might not take very longer for people to take notice, and when they do, the sheer size of the entire structure is robust enough to offer something to anyone related to the sport.

Tennis fans should check out TennisEarth!