How to Run a Tennis Tournament Practice Desk

The practice desk is the busiest customer-service counter at any tournament. Get it right and players barely notice it; get it wrong and you spend the week fielding complaints about who got which court. The good news: the workflow is well defined by the ATP/WTA and ITF practice guidelines, and most of the pain comes from improvising instead of following them.

Open early, with courts ready

Court availability is staged by event tier. Under the ATP availability schedule, courts open from 9am: Masters 1000 outdoors three days before qualifying, M1000 indoors two days before, ATP 500/250 outdoors two days before, and 500/250 indoors the Friday before. Know your number so the first players of the day are not waiting on you.

Take requests through one queue

Whether players come to the desk in person or message in, log every request into a single ordered queue. Circuit control-desk best practice is to work requests chronologically, so callers are not fast-tracked over people who asked first. One queue, one order, no exceptions, is the single biggest source of perceived fairness.

Run match warm-ups as the priority lane

Match warm-ups (around 30 minutes, sometimes 45 at ATP Challengers) are prioritised in the window before play, scheduled in order of play. Qualifying is prioritised over the main draw. Keep this lane visibly separate from ordinary next-day practice so a competing player never gets stuck behind a casual hit.

Staff for the draw size

• A 96 draw needs a minimum of four phone lines on the desk
• Draws bigger than 48 must have one person dedicated to WhatsApp
• M1000 events must appoint an experienced practice desk manager
• Tournaments must use a professional booking platform, not pen and paper

That last point is now a baseline expectation rather than a nicety. A purpose-built platform like Maindraw replaces the spreadsheet, phone and WhatsApp scramble with a single rules-aware desk, which is exactly what these staffing minimums are trying to make possible.