2026 U.S. Tennis Participation Report<\/a>, sort of like Carlos Alcaraz\u2019s hair each day of the 2025 U.S. Open after he had shaved his head. Last year, 2025, U.S. tennis participation bounced up further by 1.6 million players to 27.3 million Americans. That\u2019s around a six percent increase if you don\u2019t have an abacus or enough fingers handy to count and calculate. <\/p>\nPatrick McEnroe, former professional tennis player and captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team and current tennis broadcaster and co-director of the John McEnroe Tennis Academy, called this \u201ca boom for tennis the last five years.\u201d He told me about how the JMTA courts on Randall\u2019s Island in New York City \u201cwent from 20 to 29 courts and from four to eight every day, every court is packed with four to five kids per courts. So, not only are adults playing, but we\u2019ve been able to attract a lot more kids and keep them in it.\u201d <\/p>\n
Since 2019 U.S. Tennis Participation Has Grown By 54 Percent<\/h2>\n
Yeah, tennis has been making quite a racket throughout the 2020s. It began with nature sort of dropping a deuce on everyone and the U.S. being ill-prepared to handle it. In March 2020 when the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 was spreading in an uncontrolled fashion, the U.S. had to scramble to flatten the curve\u2014remember that?\u2014and buy time to figure out what to do. With no clear strategy from the U.S. government, the default was to have lots of things just shut down kind of indefinitely at the time.<\/p>\n
I wrote about all that in Forbes<\/em> in 2020 and how with no real guidance on how Americans could stay physical active and socializing, tennis served up an opportunity to do both while maintaining enough distance from each other to prevent virus transmission. \u201cI think we all know why in the pandemic [tennis participation grew], because there wasn\u2019t a lot that people could do sporting-wise and activity wise,\u201d McEnroe recalled. \u201cTennis was one of the sports that people could play.\u201d That year saw a 22 percent increase in tennis participation as I covered in Forbes<\/em>. <\/p>\nBut even as society bounced back from 2020, tennis participation did not. No it kept bouncing forward. And I kept writing about this remarkable spin on things, in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. That\u2019s because this has been one of the continuing feel-good stories from the COVID-19 pandemic. The result has been tennis participation growing by a whopping 54 percent since 2019. Those six consecutive years of growth have added nearly 10 million players in this country.<\/p>\n
4.9 Million Picked Up Tennis Racquets For The First Time In 2025<\/h2>\n
The report was based on responses to the Physical Activity Council Study on Sports and Physical Activity and the PLAY Study, formerly known as the Participation and Engagement Study. These two studies consist of surveying each year a total of around 36,000 people in the U.S. Survey responses also showed that 4.9 million picked up tennis racquets for the first time in 2025. This was nine percent more racquet newbies than there were in 2024. <\/p>\n
Oh, and the surveys showed that what happened on the court tended to stay on the court as well. Most tennis players have kept on dropshotting rather than dropping out of the sport. Around 20.7 million players stayed with the sport. That\u2019s a 10 percent increase from 2024. There also seemed to be many happy returns with 1.7 million players coming back to the sport after having been away for more than a year.<\/p>\n
Then there are the tennis curious. An estimated 25 million Americans who currently don\u2019t play tennis do have a lot interest in playing. They may not have the balls or the racquets or whatever to do so right now. But they could someday add to the total. <\/p>\n