The Garden Tennis Affiliation has confirmed that Queen’s Membership will host a WTA Tour match subsequent summer season as a part of the change to the grass courtroom season.
The governing physique cited a want to boost the profile of girls’s tennis and advertise to extra folks for the modifications, which might see the Birmingham and Eastbourne tournaments downgraded.
The brand new girls’s occasion, which can happen per week after the French Open, implies that a tour-level girls’s match will come to London for the primary time in additional than 50 years.
It means Birmingham’s Edgbaston Priory Membership, which has hosted the WTA Tour since 1982, will now host the second tier mixed males’s and ladies’s occasion in week two of the French Open.
The mixed males’s and ladies’s occasion in Nottingham will probably be moved to the identical week as the lads’s occasion at Queen’s, and the mixed occasion in Eastbourne the week earlier than Wimbledon is now at a low of 250 for each excursions.
The LTA revealed final month that the stumbling block was the ATP’s concern over the impression of the earlier week’s girls’s match on its competitors, second solely to Wimbledon throughout the British grass-court circuit.
Chris Pollard, the LTA’s director of main occasions and digital, admitted the association might solely final a 12 months if male gamers had been sad.
“Now we have each confidence that we will placed on a two-week occasion on the Queen’s Membership,” he mentioned.
“Clearly Wimbledon proves that grass can face up to two weeks of tennis. Now we have unbiased knowledge that actually offers lots of proof that Males’s Week won’t undergo in any manner form or kind.
“Now we have had many discussions with each excursions about this. (ATP) have given the inexperienced gentle to host the match in 2025 and we proceed to have an ongoing dialogue with them about success in 2025. match.
“They want to think about what occurs after 2025, however we proceed to have a really shut dialogue with them on this and stay very assured that this will probably be a everlasting change.”
The distinction in prize cash between the excursions means the lads will earn extra money from their match, whereas Pollard careworn the LTA’s dedication to each occasions being broadcast free-to-air.
In the meantime, the second-tier match at Surbiton, which kicked off the grass-court season, will probably be canceled subsequent 12 months, however Ilkley will proceed to host the lads’s and ladies’s tournaments.