Aflac has made the biggest commitment to women’s sport this market has seen, and it does not take the field until 2028. There is a professional co-ed league playing here every summer in between, in a window nothing else in Atlanta occupies.
A partnership proposal · about four minutes
“This one you can have fun.” — in the stands, Atlanta
A gender-balanced Professional Team Tennis League
Eight playing weeks in the middle of the summer. Switch the view to see the
same season against the American sports year, or against the college calendar our players come from.
INTENNSE Grand Slams Team events
INTENNSE Regular season Postseason
INTENNSE Regular season Postseason & championships
2026 season. INTENNSE: 5 June – 1 August, 58 days, one dark week for Wimbledon. Sources: data.intennse.com/2026/calendar.tsv; published tournament calendars.2026 calendar year. The NBA and NHL finished on 13 and 14 June; the NFL’s season opens 9 September; LOVB ran January to April. Only MLB is in season through INTENNSE’s eight weeks. Sources: published league calendars; INTENNSE figures from data.intennse.com.NCAA Division I, 2026 as it happened. Both the men’s and the women’s team championships finished on Sunday 17 May at the Dan Magill Tennis Complex in Athens, Georgia — Virginia over Texas, Texas A&M over Auburn. The NCAA has moved singles and doubles out of May: they are now a November event, so a graduating senior has nothing left on the college calendar at all. Basketball’s season opened in November 2025; the January football block is the 2025 season’s playoff. D-I carries 5,207 tennis players across 541 programmes. Sources: ncaa.com championship releases, official school schedules, NCAA Sports Sponsorship and Participation Rates Report 2024–25.
Where our players have been on the tour, and where they sit on the rating that
covers everyone. The orange rule is where tennis starts paying for itself.
Career high September 2026MVP race ↗ (second scale) alone = no tour ranking, placed by MVP standingName in yellow = straight from college
Rounds 1–3 of the 2026 draft, plus three players the draft board leaves out altogether and one fourth-round pick: 56 in all. Forty-seven carry an ATP or WTA career high. The nine below the dotted line in each panel have no tour ranking on record and are placed by where they finished in the league’s own MVP race — among them Sofia Cabezas, fifth in that race, and Corey Craig, thirteenth, straight out of Florida State. Two more carry a career high but no current singles ranking, so they show a career-high dot alone. Fourth-round picks are otherwise excluded — 2027 rosters are three women and three men. The one exception is John Chin, 19th of 31 men over four Arcs, ahead of eight higher picks including two first-rounders. A player placed by MVP standing needs more than one Arc behind the number: Season Score is the sum of a player’s best six rounds divided by six, so a single appearance is not a season. Ranking axis runs worst to best, left to right, as in the UTR chart below. The MVP race is a separate scale, and it stops at our own best-ranked player rather than running the width of the chart — it ranks these players against each other inside the league, not against the tour. Aliona Bolsova sits inside that line on both counts: a career high of 88, inside a Grand Slam draw, and first in the 2026 MVP race. A career high is never drawn worse than the player’s current ranking: where a recorded best is stale, the best is at least today’s rank and the two collapse to a single point. Tier cut-offs: main draw top 128 — the draw size of a Grand Slam — Challenger 129–350, ITF Futures 351–900 (the ITF renamed the Futures circuit the World Tennis Tour in 2019). The orange rule is the break-even ranking — where prize money covers the cost of competing. It is drawn at ~150, which is where a peer-reviewed 2026 study puts it once a realistic cost base including a coach is counted — and every professional has a coach. The faint rule behind it is the ITF’s own 2013 figure, 336 for men and 253 for women, which sits at a worse ranking only because those costs exclude coaching and all support-team expense. It is the bar nobody actually competes under. Against the real bar: of the 26 men here with a career high, all 26 never reached 150; of 21 women, 19 never did — the exceptions are Aliona Bolsova at 88 and Usue Arconada at 130. On today’s rankings it is unanimous: 25 of 25 ranked men and 20 of 20 ranked women sit outside break-even. Sources: draft.intennse.com, stats.intennse.com MVP race, intennse.com player pages, Tennis Abstract, retrieved 20–21 September 2026; ITF Pro Circuit Review, Stage One: Data Analysis, December 2014; Schöttl et al., Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 29 June 2026.
UTR: our players against the tour’s
INTENNSE player Straight from collegeTop three picks per team Tour band (10th–90th percentile)
Bands derived from 286 players who publish both a UTR rating and an ATP/WTA ranking, taken at the 10th–90th percentile of each tier. INTENNSE ratings: the top three men and three women per 2026 roster — 28 men and 30 women carry a rating on the league’s own draft board. Source: draft.intennse.com players board, retrieved 20 September 2026.
Down to the wire; Sudden Death
Two Arcs that finished a point apart. Each clip picks up in the closing minutes,
with the full Arc a click away.
Sudden death, level at 142
The final three minutes of Freeze v Rise, 20 June. The clock runs out with the teams tied, and the next point decides it: 143–142.
Two big Atlanta bets, and neither of them plays in the summer.
The kickoff game is a football property and lands at the end of August.
The NWSL club is a seven-year commitment to a team that does not take the field until 2028.
Between the two sits a season and a half in which the name is committed and the games have
not started.
INTENNSE plays June to August. In 2027 that is sixty-five matches
across eight weeks, up from forty-three this year, in the only window on the Atlanta
calendar where nothing else is competing — the NBA and NHL have finished, the NFL has
not begun, and the city’s winter properties are all dark.
Metro Atlanta, on a Friday night in July
■ What you have already decided
You did not need convincing that women’s sport is worth buying.
That argument is usually the whole pitch. Here it is already settled: the
front-of-kit position on Atlanta’s NWSL club is reported as the largest women’s-sport
commitment this market has produced, and it was made before the club had a name.
So this is not a proposal that women’s sport deserves investment. It is a
proposal about what you do with that conviction in 2027, while the thing you
bought is still being built.
Three women, three menOn court for every team, sharing one cumulative score.
A point won by a woman counts exactly what a point won by a man counts.Format, not policy
Salaried, not entrantsPlayers are employees on a base wage with league
coaching, across an eight-week season.Both genders, same terms
Playing nowTwo completed seasons. Nine sellouts in 2026, every match carried
live.2027 season is the fourth
■ The audience
Sixty thousand adults in this metro play tennis in a league every week.
The Atlanta Lawn Tennis Association was founded here in 1934 and calls
itself the largest tennis-based community organisation in the world, with more than
60,000 members. They are not people who watch tennis occasionally. They play
it, in teams, on a schedule, across the whole metro.
They are also, demographically, the people who buy supplemental insurance:
working adults with families, in the suburbs, who organise their week around a commitment.
Nobody has sold them a professional tennis property in this city because until two years ago
there was not one.
The community programme
■ What is open
No insurer has bought anything here.
Thirteen corporate partners signed for 2026 and none of them is an insurance
company. The category is unclaimed, which means an exclusive rather than a negotiation against an
incumbent.
Official insurance partnerCategory exclusivity across the league, its teams
and its broadcast.Open
The Challenge SeriesAn open-entry tournament inside every event — 16
men, 16 women, anyone can enter, and the top three of each earn a place on a team that plays a
professional side.Unsold
The community programmeShowcases and exhibitions across metro Atlanta through
the season, with players present as part of the commitment.Unsold
Broadcast and in-venueEvery Arc carried live. The court is small and the crowd
is on top of it, so in-play signage is broadcast signage.Available
■ What the season did
Two seasons, and the numbers behind them.
478,483Unique viewers across the 2026 season
43Arcs, every one carried live
254MVideo views, up 1,037% year on year
$52Average ticket
Broadcast figures from the Unbeaten Sports Channel
season report, measured to 31 August 2026. Team merchandise outsold league merchandise, which is
the number that says people picked a side.
■ The ask
An hour, and the inventory.
We are not asking you to take a position on women’s sport. You have taken
one, at a scale nobody else in this market has matched. We are asking what carries it through
2027, in the eight weeks of the year when Atlanta has nothing else to watch.
If it is worth a conversation, we will bring the full asset list, what each piece
delivered in 2026 where we can prove it, and what is still open.
