A professional league in Atlanta where six people share one score on a clock, the crowd sits on top of the court, and the players are salaried employees who are contracted to be there for eight weeks. No campaign attached — we just think it is the most unfilmed thing in tennis.
An introduction · about four minutes
“This one you can have fun.” — in the stands, Atlanta
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.
“I always say my page is to showcase tennis in a way that’s never been seen
before.”
Ben Johnson · Tennis.com, 11 November 2025
There is a version of tennis in Atlanta that genuinely
has not been seen, and the reason is dull: nobody has pointed the right camera at it. It has been
broadcast — forty-three matches went out live this year — but broadcast is not the
same as being filmed, and you know the difference better than we do.
Three women and three men on court for one team, sharing a single cumulative
score, on a clock, finished inside an hour and forty. Every point counts the same whoever wins
it. It looks nothing like the sport you have been shooting for three years, and
it is forty minutes from a Delta hub.
■ What it actually looks like
There is no upper bowl. The crowd is on top of the court.
The arena seats hundreds, not thousands, and the front row is close enough
to hear what players say to each other. Nine of this year’s events sold out. There is
no long lens needed and no distance to fight — which is either the whole appeal or
nothing, depending on how you shoot.
Other things in the frame: a running clock rather than deuce; the two-point
Bolt that can turn a match in one shot; ball keepers who wear the team jersey because the
single-ball rule makes them part of the side rather than staff; and a championship weekend
that ends in smoke and confetti with six people on court instead of one.
INTENNSE Arena — the front row is the court
■ The part that is hard everywhere else
The players are employees. They are here for eight weeks and they are contracted to be
available.
On tour, access is a negotiation with a press officer around people who
arrive, play and leave, and whose whole professional instinct is to give away nothing. You
have described the result yourself: a lot of time in press rooms and hotels.
Here, players are salaried W2 employees on a roster, in one city, for a
whole season. They practise in the same place every day. They do community exhibitions as
part of the job. Nobody has to be talked into being filmed, because being present is
the contract. For someone whose currency is access rather than results, that is a
structurally different thing from a tournament.
One roster, one city, one summer
■ Things you could do with it
None of these is a proposal. They are just what the place makes possible.
Play your way inThe Challenge Series is an open draw inside every event
— sixteen men, sixteen women, anyone can enter. The top three of each earn a place on a
team that plays a professional side that week. No ranking required, because most people
entering do not have one.You said you wanted to enter tournaments
A season, not a weekEight weeks in one city, the same people, a table that
matters in August because of what happened in June. Almost nothing you cover has a
middle.Continuity
The city underneath itAtlanta has more league tennis players than anywhere in
America — roughly sixty thousand adults playing in teams every week, in a place nobody
films.The unshot market
The bit that movesIn 2028 the teams leave Atlanta for their own cities. If
you start now you have the before.An arc
The first one is there because you have said twice in
public that you would like to start entering tournaments and make something out of it. We are
not going to pretend that was our idea.
■ Why we are writing
There is no ask attached to this.
We are not proposing a campaign, a deliverable or a deal, and we are not asking
you to post anything. You have said you have reached the point of turning work down to avoid
becoming a catalogue, and a cold brief would be exactly that.
We would rather you simply knew this existed — that there is a professional
league in America built on a format you have not filmed, with players who are paid to be in the
room. If you are ever curious enough to come and look at it, the door is open and you
would owe us nothing. What you made of it, if you made anything at all, would be yours.
Season three runs June to August 2027. Anything before that is an empty arena and
a practice court, which is sometimes the better film.
