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Should we start referring to the “off-season” as “selfie season” instead? If you’re a tennis fan with a Twitter account, you’ve likely been bombarded with group shots of grinning stars over the last week. Serena, Maria, Andy, Gael, Tomas, Lleyton, Ana, Marin, Nick, Andre, Caro, Fabrice and others have spent as much time squeezing themselves together in front of camera phones as they have on court.

All of these players, and quite a few more, are currently participating in the inaugural season of the International Professional Tennis League in Asia. The IPTL is a team tennis exhibition tour put together by former Indian doubles specialist and player agent Mahesh Bhupathi. It began in Manila last week, and is traveling to Singapore, India, and the UAE.

Like World TeamTennis, the emphasis here is on crowd engagement and fast-paced fun. Matches are one set, a 20-second shot clock is in place, and the players come together to form star-studded, oddball mixed-doubles teams you won’t see anywhere else. Want to watch Andy Murray with Maria Sharapova? Or Serena Williams with Nick Kyrgios? IPTL has you covered. The Times of Indiadescribed one of the league’s matches this way:

“Departing from the traditional image of the sport, the IPTL features a DJ and skimpily-attired women dancing between rests to work up the crowd.”

That sounds like a good time, right? The players are certainly doing their best to make it look like one. They ride buses together, hang out on planes together, and even get their fellow players to dress up as flight attendants and serve them drinks.

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For now, IPTL is just a late-season lark and lucrative hit-and-giggle—the winners get $1 million, and all of the big names were handsomely compensated well before they stepped on a plane to get there. Who knows if any of them will do it again next year? But the camaraderie the league has inspired does show us the untapped power of the team format in this individual sport.

The revelation and appeal of IPTL has been seeing the men and women hanging out with each other, free from the hierarchy imposed by status and rankings, acting as if they’re all part of one happy tennis family. While they play many of the same events during the regular season, the ATP and WTA have run on separate tracks for four decades, with a good dose of friction and resentment between them. IPTL has shown us how much potential star power tennis is sacrificing by not combining the tours’ forces more closely; the game only gains when it sells itself as one entity. This has always been Billie Jean King's dream for World TeamTennis, and it remains a valid one.

When she started WTT in the 1970s, tennis was riding a high of mainstream popularity. That's not the case in the U.S. now, but tennis does work well with the modern, social-media-driven way of consuming sports, which crosses borders and is focused on celebrity. Tennis is nothing if not a vast collection of international celebrities; IPTL has done the logical thing and collected them in one place. Apparently, you don’t even need the biggest ATP celebrities to have a good time. What’s interesting is that IPTL so far hasn't included any of the Big 3, Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, or Rafael Nadal (Federer and Djokovic are due to join the festivities soon). All it took to set off a storm on my Twitter timeline was for Murray and Sharapova to play on the same side of the court for a set.

There’s no reason why tennis couldn’t be a team sport; it certainly works nicely in Davis Cup and Fed Cup, and anyone who has ever played on a college or league team knows that it’s fun to share the game’s highs and lows with other people. But for now, team tennis, at least when it comes to the IPTL, remains a late-season lark, a lucrative hit-and-giggle, a selfie in the sky.

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While it has been fun to watch tennis’s jet set live the exo life for the last week, there has also been news from those struggling in the sport’s trenches. Not surprisingly, it hasn’t been as happy. Tomas Buchhass, a 22-year-old Argentine player, wrote an open letter to the ITF about the conditions at a Futures event in Chile (I found it reprinted at BATennis World). Here’s an excerpt of his description of the tournament:

“Courts in a pitiful state which are a hazard to the physical well-being of the players, without a restaurant in which to eat; during the first round of qualifications, a ball was lost and there was no replacement; there were matches scheduled on three courts, but one had to be discarded due to disastrous quality of the court, and the matches were put on another court, with the lines hand painted with a line of chalk, which is to say it was impossible for them to be straight or with the correct measurements.

The prize money remains at $10,000, which doesn’t even cover the costs of playing the tournaments, let alone making money if someone wishes to do things the proper way and travel with a coach. Even winning the tournament doesn’t cover the costs of playing it.

This is the beginning of the road to become someone in tennis and it’s completely deteriorated!”

Buchhass isn’t the first minor-leaguer to make complaints like these. Even as prize money has increased for early-round losers at the majors, it has stagnated for years at the Challenger and Future level. Julien Benneteau cites this as a reason that tennis has grown older over the last decade; it’s too hard, he believes, for talented young players to make a living and get a foothold in the sport.

Comparing the IPTL to the ITF is something like comparing public and private institutions in the U.S.—the IPTL is a deep-pocketed, money-making venture, while the ITF has a public-service mission to grow the game, at all levels, around the world. Not everyone can make a living playing tennis, but the sport needs the best athletes it can get, even if they never become bankable stars. When they get back to tennis’ real world, those famous people jetting around Asia will still need people to play.