A professional tennis league with two seasons behind it, ten teams, and everything still to sell. We are looking for the person who builds the commercial side of it from here.
The role, in full · about five minutes
In the stands, Atlanta · Season 2
54Arcs delivered in 2026, 43 of them Pro
10Teams, moving to their own markets in 2028
13Corporate partners in 2026
9Sellouts
2Seasons complete, players paid in both
What the job is.
INTENNSE is a professional co-ed team tennis league: three women and three men on court for
each team, one shared score, about an hour and forty minutes. It played its second season this
summer — forty-three Pro Arcs across eight weeks, all carried live, nine of them sold out,
inside fifty-four Arcs in total. Players are employees on a salary, not entrants chasing prize money.
The league is at the point where the product is proven and the commercial machine is not yet
built. Sponsorship has been sold by relationships rather than by a structure. Team charters are
being sold to city owners for 2028. Media is carried but not yet paid for. Ticketing works in
one city and has never been built for ten.
This role owns all of it, and reports to the CEO.
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.
Sponsorship. Forty-seven sellable assets across nine categories, most of them never
priced. Thirteen partners signed in 2026, twelve through existing relationships — which
means there is no pipeline discipline yet and no rate card. Building both is the first job.
Team charters. Every team moves to a home market in 2028. Selling those charters to
city owners, and supporting the owners who buy them, is the largest single revenue line in
front of the league.
Media. The 2026 season was carried live in full by a national partner. Converting
distribution into a rights relationship that pays is open, unclaimed work.
Ticketing and the local business. Nine sellouts, an average ticket above fifty
dollars, and team merchandise outselling league merchandise. That is a working local model that
has never been systematised across markets.
The commercial team. There is not one yet. You would hire it.
Who this is for, and who it is not.
This is a fit if
You have carried a revenue number at a property, an agency or a rights holder, and you
have built something rather than inherited it.
You want the parts of the job that are usually already decided — what gets sold,
at what price, to whom, under what structure.
You are comfortable that a meaningful part of the compensation is equity in something
that is two years old.
This is not a fit if
You want a team behind you on day one, or a budget that already exists.
You need the category to be established. Team tennis has been tried before and this
league is arguing it can work now, on evidence rather than nostalgia.
You are looking for a title. The work is selling, and it stays that way for a while.
We are deliberately not filtering for tennis experience. The league
sells sponsorship, charters, media and tickets — those skills transfer, and the sport can
be learned. Atlanta has no standing tennis commercial bench in any case.
Where and how.
Atlanta. The league is based here and plays its 2027 season here. Atlanta was
named the number one US city for sports business this year, and the league's own season was built
inside that market — twelve of thirteen partners came from relationships already in the
city.
Compensation is cash plus equity, and the split is a conversation rather than
a band. We would rather structure it around the person than advertise a number we would then
negotiate away from.
Where it stands.
Two seasons is not a long track record, and the audience is still being built. What is also
true: the product works on the floor, the players get paid, the local economics held up in the
city where they were tested, and none of the commercial upside has been captured yet.
That last part is the job.
If it is worth a conversation, we will take it from there.