‘Game, set and matchmaker’? The US Open gets into reality TV dating game

Last week, the United States Tennis Association made an unexpected announcement. The US Open, one of the sport’s four grand slam tournaments, will be inserting itself in the saturated world of reality-show dating.

The announcement raised a few eyebrows and set off widespread online chatter that is best encapsulated on Instagram by professional tennis player and US Open contender Donna Vekic, who said: “Wait what?”

According to a statement from the USTA, the tournament will host its own reality series, set at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens. The eight-episode series, called “Game, Set, Matchmaker,” will be filmed the week before the event begins in late August. It will air on YouTube during the tournament.

The bachelorette at the center of the series is Ilana Sedaka, a “tennis-savvy” 24-year-old former figure-skating champion and Pilates teacher, who was born and raised in Long Island and now lives in Miami. She will be matched with seven men, and will go on dates that will include playing games and exploring the tennis center. A contestant will be sent home at the end of each episode.

“My hope is to bring a little joy, a little chaos and a whole lot of realness to the court,” Sedaka said in a news release. The USTA did not divulge how Sedaka was chosen or share any details on the male contestants.

The decision to film a dating show — and the sponsorships it drew from Dobel Tequila and Moët & Chandon — illustrates that, at the end of the day, “sports is a business,” said Marsha-Gaye Knight, an assistant professor at the Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport at New York University. Knight added that “sport and culture are very intertwined,” whether that’s tennis, basketball or football.

“Let’s be honest, a lot of people watch tennis because Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are there,” she said.

Basketball star Stephen Curry, actress Tina Fey and Vogue’s global editorial director, Anna Wintour, all attended the U.S. Open last year. The other Grand Slams, which are held in London, Paris and Melbourne, Australia, consistently draw their own star-studded audiences, too. And celebrity fashion choices at the games become social media catnip for their fans, Knight said.

At a moment when shows like the Love Island franchises, The Bachelor and Love Is Blind seem to have overtaken cultural conversation, putting on a dating show is an attempt by the USTA to bolster the sport’s cultural cachet beyond tennis purists.

“We are trying to attract an entirely new audience, reaching fans at the intersection of tennis, pop culture and entertainment,” a spokesperson for the association said in an emailed statement.

The USTA has also been trying to boost participation in tennis. According to research conducted by the association, 1 in 12 Americans — about 26 million people — played tennis in 2024, which is the highest it has been in five years. That makes it among the most popular sports in the United States; recent research found that 28 million Americans play basketball and just over 15 million play baseball.

Despite that level of participation, professional tennis still draws a far smaller viewing audience than football and basketball in the United States, according to a recent market research report, and Generation Z, Knight added, simply isn’t watching sports on television as much as previous generations.

“The U.S. Open realises that for them to appeal to new audiences and tap into new sectors, they have to go where audiences are,” she said. “Audiences are no longer chasing sports; we have to now chase our audiences.”

Not all tennis fans, however, were excited by news of the dating show, with some noting that it disrespects the game and turns the U.S. Open into a gimmicky tournament.

The overarching reaction, though, was confusion. Some on social media pointed out that the show seemed to nod at themes from Challengers”, the critically acclaimed 2024 film that starred Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor as professional tennis players entangled in a steamy love triangle, which only added a layer of intrigue.

“I don’t get this,” Savannah Guthrie, a host of NBC’s “Today,” said in a Friday morning broadcast, before offering to host the series. “I don’t understand. Do you have to be into tennis?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.