The state of recreational tennis in Bangalore
A data driven analysis of this lovely sport in the city of Bangalore, India
In this article, we are going to look at some numbers and pretty graphs around how recreational tennis players in Bangalore look like. This is a Whatsapp community that I created about a year ago which has grown to about 300 players now. Well, 300 seems like a big and interesting number. You’d expect that players here are actively seeking out and playing quite frequently, competing in various tournaments and are meeting their yearly goals on how much tennis they want to play but the picture is …. different.
Some more context about this Whatsapp community, this has a group dedicated to a region of Bangalore to make it easier for players to find other players in their vicinity or in areas that they are able to play. Typically, a single group for all players just makes it too noisy for players to find others and results in spam, attrition and eventually becomes dead. For a community to thrive, it needs a regular influx of new players who come and stir up the pot from time to time. Let us look at what these numbers are and the story they communicate
Players
This is a high level overview of how this community grew over time. Out of ~270, only 18 players were added by other community members. We have seen about 70% of those happen in the last month and have seen an increase trend in players organically adding other members through word of mouth.
It’s also very interesting to observe the size of these groups across the city. I don’t see any correlation to population, average age group of a locality (or) the number of tennis courts in an area etc. I think the community is still nascent and doesn’t reflect any trends and correlations yet. I’d give it another year of fast-paced growth to start seeing something more interesting.
Looking at the map above, there are obvious whitespaces for groups to be formed and players to be found. Most of the activity and players we have found seem to be from the most ‘hustling’ areas of the city. It is a strong possibility that players in other regions are not seeking players on platforms like Playo and have a set group of friends/fellow players they have been playing with.
Activity
This section is going to focus on engagement and activity of users across different groups.
The activity has been picking up recently and we have observed an increase in the number of players coming together to play. The number of messages does directly correlate to the number of games played amongst the group members. I don’t know if this is genuine interest to come together and play or a lot of FOMO about players coming together to play. One very obvious pattern is that the number of people taking initiatives to host games and bring people together is a key driver for the activity(as obvious as it sounds)
The number of people joining the group has been gradually increasing. It has a few upticks here and there but has usually maintained a steady growth of 5-20 new members joining every month. Not all regions follow the same pattern but some areas like HSR, Koramangala and Indiranagar seem to have picked up some activity lately. In general, it seems like about ~55% of the users are active1 and send messages in the group. We obviously can’t figure out what proportion of this 45% of users are reading messages and what percentage of these are not even checking these messages. This could be an eventual analysis
If we break down the growth of activity in the community, we may notice that January seems to have seen one of the most active months with about 50 players being active. Most of this seems to have happened in Koramangala. The green line does clearly correlate with the user growth, but it’s also very interesting to observe that everytime there is an influx of new users, activity spikes up. It’s either the new players coming in to introduce themselves, asking questions - which seems to stir up some activity.
I am also enjoying how active the Koramangala group has become. I often see players come together to go and play in KSLTA, which seem to be the most well maintained courts in Bangalore. This is where all of the AITA/ITF tournaments in Bangalore happen. This is how the most active group in the community looks like, in terms of activity over time
What does this not include?
So far, the community is attracting adults who are playing recreational tennis only. We see some people come join the group who are looking for other advanced/regular players but seem to have a hard time finding other serious, regular players in the area where they live. This also excludes players who live in a gate community which has a court(s) inside the community, making it easier for them to play and not have to rely on communities like this.
What next?
The goal would be to make the community bigger and find other proponents and active players around the city. This will help increase engagement of all the players within each region. We are also actively trying to get this community featured in sports groups of specific universities and alumni groups, corporates(Infosys, Google etc.), players from gated communities etc.
One of my other goals has been to host a Flex league like the ones played in the US where a round robin amongst similarly ranked players goes on for 8 weeks before a 4 week knockout phase to crown the champion for that division. The hassle is to find a region dense enough with players and courts to be able to host something like this. I’m sure players would love participating in a tournament like this because this opens them up to network and play with all kinds of players around their area
In our next edition:
Visualize the density of tennis courts around the city. These will include courts inside apartment complexes, universities, schools and tennis clubs.
Distribution of the level of players across the city. Is the major chunk of players beginners (or) do we have lots of advanced players?
We are open to ideas! Please reach out if you have any thoughts on what you’d like to see next.
If you’d like to be a part of the community, reach out to me and I’ll share the invite link. If you are already a part of the community and have been trying to get back to playing tennis more, let’s do this!
A user is considered active if they have sent at least one message in any of the groups in the community