Tennis can trace its roots back to 11th century medieval France and has gone on to become one of the world’s biggest sports. But participation rates have been falling in the millions as competition from other leisure activities rises, as does the sense that the sport is inaccessible, accelerated by a disjointed digital ecosystem that makes finding and booking a court difficult.
Recognising the challenge of falling engagement, the LTA (Lawn Tennis Association), Britain’s National Governing Body for Tennis, created the vision of ‘Tennis Opened Up’ to help make it more accessible and welcoming to all abilities and backgrounds. But how could they deliver on that vision?
AMBITION
Making tennis more accessible and welcoming for everyone
The LTA wanted to get more people onto the courts and playing tennis. The sporting body wanted to use this vision to boost engagement, maintain its relevance to customers and stakeholders, while making tennis more accessible and welcoming to people of all abilities and backgrounds.
ACTION
Putting tennis on the digital map
Together, Deloitte worked with LTA to deliver on the vision. We began with a digital strategy that would bring the ‘Tennis Opened Up’ vision to life. This included tailored recommendations for key customer groups, such as coaches, players, venues, fans, and colleagues. These were based on our assessment of the LTA’s digital capabilities, ways of working, and technology infrastructure. We then focused on building an improved digital experience.
We worked on everything from building a new website to creating bespoke digital platforms and digitising the LTA’s entire inventory of courts into a simple booking app called LTA Play. We created bespoke digital platforms, where volunteers across the country could monitor and accelerate their development, while implementing a system that gathered and collated millions of data points, to help the LTA‘s decision-makers develop strategies to grow tennis.
We also worked with the LTA to help to launch the Free Park Tennis Programme, which gives people the opportunity to play tennis for free. The work Deloitte delivered for the LTA wasn’t just about using technology for technology’s sake. We applied emerging technology to deliver meaningful transformation, and our Deloitte Digital team played a pivotal role in achieving the bigger vision, using their diverse range of skills from experience design to engineering to create new ways to engage and capture the attention of the audience.
The team focused in on the younger racket sport of Padel. In the UK around 90,000 new players pick up a Padel racket every year making it the world’s fastest growing sport. We were curious about how technology could help make it even more accessible and appeal to young people. We developed an immersive experience that fused generative AI and Padel and invited the target audience, 16-25 year olds, to co-create this experience alongside us at the Stratford Padel Club in London. The result? A tech-powered Padel experience - RacketFusion. Smart target walls improved player’s aim, avatar generators created an animated Padel persona, and an AI instructor became an on-demand oracle for all things Padel with hints, tips and tricks to improve the game.
ACHIEVEMENT
Game. Set. Match.
The LTA’s digital transformation resulted in a surge of engagement and excitement across the country. The ‘Tennis Opened Up’ campaign saw the number of adults regularly playing tennis increase from 3.3m in 2021 to 5.3m in 2023.
The newly launched website has made tennis more discoverable via search engines. The LTA’s search engine result ranking has increased by 130%, while the LTA Play app provides users with a central booking site to access courts across the country. This means there are now over 1.1m hours of bookable courts and courses across Britain for players of all abilities to access. Before the ‘Tennis Opened Up’ campaign, only 2,600 venues were registered with the LTA. Today 15,000 venues are LTA-registered, and 650 parks will be made available on LTA Play by the end of 2023. And by fusing the sport of Padel with generative AI, we were able to create a space for innovation. For excitement. For fun. And the hundreds of people that played in the months that followed.
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By creating a digital strategy, and meaningfully applying emerging tech to help solve a problem, we helped the LTA connect with new audiences, in new ways. And more importantly, put more rackets into diverse hands.
