Updates from September 2026

Jon Wertheim writes in his Sports Illustrated Mailbag:

There were a number of questions this week about Patrick McEnroe’s appearance before Congress. Patrick’s crusade to limit overseas players being awarded college tennis (and sports) scholarships has won him favor with certain lawmakers. 

A) Let’s be clear: this is not jingoism. Having athletes from overseas on college teams is a win-win. Nobody—including Patrick—wants an outright ban on international athletes. Foreign athletes add to a team culture and fabric and should be totally welcome. The question is one of quantity and quality. As for quality, when schools can recruit top 200 ATP players in their 20s, as Texas recently did, it perverts competition and flies in the face of fairness. Likewise, when teams stack their entire roster with international players, in the eyes of many (myself included), it violates the spirit of college sports. 

B) At a time when nonrevenue sports are on the chopping block, this recruiting “strategy” seems especially short-sighted. If athletic directors tasked with cutting sports must choose between programs filled with taxpayers’ kids and this roster, the choice is easy. 

C) I heard that zero top college coaches went to Kalamazoo this year. Why? When you can recruit top-200 ATP players, why spend time luring 16-year-old Americans? This is brutal for American tennis. What a chilling effect this could have on U.S. junior tennis.

D) Legal challenges aside, the obvious solution is a cap. Either a set number of scholarships per team (maybe two?) or a roster that must mirror the school’s demographics. Take Lander University in South Carolina: International students make up 2% to 3% of the student body. Yet here’s its tennis roster. Can anyone honestly make a good-faith case that this aligns with the values of college athletics?  

E) The Intercollegiate Tennis Association has been toothless when it should be ruthless. It’s disappointing that a governing body has allowed this situation to spiral without taking a meaningful stand.

F) College coaches want to win to protect their jobs. Fair enough. And college coaches have enough pressure with NIL and transfer rules. Fair enough. It’s also unclear whether a cap would survive a legal challenge. Which is why … 

G) I offer a proposal to address this issue. Full disclosure: I recently mentioned this to Patrick, and he can even call it the “McEnroe Pledge.” Quite simply—and this is similar to what Dario Amodei proposed re: AI— draft some sort of informal, unenforceable covenant: I eagerly recruit international players. They add to the culture of a team. They introduce the entire roster to different customs and parts of the world. But international players cannot be X% of the roster. Some coaches would sign. Others wouldn’t. But there would be some accountability, and coaches would have to take a stand, one way or the other. 

The Briefing - Issue No. 9

TICKETS ARE LIVE
Home Court opens April 9th-11th, 2027

RacquetX returns to the Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale. The whole racquet sports world in one room for three days. Grab your ticket and be there.

The Briefing - Issue No. 10

THIS WEEK'S DEEP DIVE
Clubs Are Becoming Social Infrastructure

Trend 05 of the RacquetX Trends 2026 series. Private club waitlists have grown from about 25 percent of clubs before the pandemic to 46 percent today, and annual attrition has fallen from 5 to 6 percent down to 3 to 4 percent, according to Club Benchmarking data reported by Golf Digest in May 2025.

The Briefing - Issue No. 11

CourtCall Voting Is Open
You Decide What Takes the Stage

For the first time, the RacquetX agenda is up to you.

CourtCall community voting is now live! You will find sessions on equipment, AI and innovation, the future of the club, and how we build this industry better from here.

You get three votes across the whole program, so spend them on the conversations you most want to see happen. 

Found one you believe in? Share it, post it, and get your community to weigh in. Rally the industry around the conversations that belong in the room.

Voting closes October 9th. Finalists will be announced in the October 27th edition of The Briefing and take the stage at RacquetX in Fort Lauderdale this April.

THE CITY SERIES
Chicago (October 6th) and Dallas (November 3rd) are next.

Kylie McKenzie vs. USTA and USTA Player Development

After the jury found the USTA guilty in 2023/24 and the judge ruled that they have to pay the plaintiff, Kylie McKenzie, $9 million in damages, the USTA started the appeals process in the 11th District (Florida). The hearings started and went all through 2025 with arguments and briefings, ending with the last argument on January 27, 2026.

Of course, there's no set date for the ruling. We learned that appellate judges don't announce when opinions will drop, and the 11th Circuit has no fixed deadline from argument to decision.

As a rough guide: opinions often land 3–6 months after oral argument, but complex civil appeals like this one (a $9M verdict with novel liability theories) routinely take 9–12 months or more. It's been about 8 months since the January 27 argument, so a decision could come at any point — but it could also still be months out. No way to know in advance.

We will keep you posted.

ESPN

Indian tennis player Somani suspended 4 years in doping case

New Change.org Petition: The WNBA Should Enact “Female-Only” Eligibility Criteria

Message from three-time Olympic gold medalist Nancy Hogshead: Keep Men Out of Women’s Sports!

Women train, sacrifice, compete, and fight unimaginably hard for the opportunity to reach the pinnacle of their sport. As a three-time Olympic gold medalist, I understand that my athletic career was made possible because women had a dedicated category to compete… and win. The athletes in the WNBA deserve to know that when they step onto the court, they will be competing on a level playing field – without biological males.

I am calling on the WNBA to explicitly clarify that “woman” means female for eligibility purposes, and to protect fair and safe competition for female athletes.

More questions for PNW executives who have expanded the section footprint into for-profit operations under the protection, goodwill, and tax-exempt advantages of a charitable non-profit organization (which they largely are not!)

• When you have successfully formed a related for-profit business entity, will you volunteer to pay back taxes and penalties?

• Will you then be allowed to keep all the fundraising in Washington without registering to solicit donations?

• Will you then be able to keep the contracts you made while not registered to do business in Washington?

• Will you change the habit of paying your Washington teaching pros below 30 hours/week so you don’t have to pay benefits, while your executives make high six figures every year?

Just asking…