Jessica Pegula and new architects eye the WTA Tour structure

Over the years, Jessica Pegula has earned a reputation as a smart, articulate and hard-working tennis player. Those qualities have also helped land her the chair of a newly announced, 13-member WTA panel (the Tour Architecture Council) charged with reviewing the women’s tennis calendar and the tour rules that govern, among other things, mandatory participation.

With luck, Pegula’s personal virtues and her experience as a six-year veteran of the Player Council have helped prepare her for the kinds of political minefields, battles and compromises that might lie ahead. The main obstacle for the TAC appears to be the lack of a clear path to revising a WTA calendar now so overloaded with compulsory events that the only way for the elite stars to feel that they are taking adequate care of their physical and mental health is by breaking the rules of their own organization.

Right now we're living in an age where the priority is always staying healthy mentally and physically, and you never know where a player is at with that. Jessica Pegula

The situation achieved critical mass early in last week's Dubai WTA 1000 (which Pegula would go on to win). Although it is a top-tier tournament in which participation is mandatory for those who qualify for the 56-player draw, five of the game’s top gate attractions, led by Aryna Sabalenka and Iga Swiatek, withdrew before the start of the tournament, and many more later withdrew or retired from matches.

“I can't knock any player that wants to make that decision for themselves,” Pegula told The National in Dubai, referring to the rule-defying withdrawals. Seeded No. 4, Pegula added, “At the end of the day, we play a lot, we play a full schedule, we play 10, 11 months out of the year sometimes. And I think right now we're living in an age where the priority is always staying healthy mentally and physically, and you never know where a player is at with that.”

The need to address the withdrawals became even more urgent after Dubai tournament director Salah Tahlak touched the third-rail of mandatory participation rules. Tahlak told The National that current sanctions on withdrawals (mainly, fines) were insufficient, and suggested that late withdrawals should include a loss of rankings points. Within days, WTA chair Valerie Camillo published a letter/press release to players and tournament operatives announcing the formation of the TAC.

Pam Shriver, the broadcast analyst and sometime WTA activist, welcomed the WTA’s announcement. She told me, “Let's get all the issues on the table, which I assume this group is going to try to do, and let's address them and try and come up with a better mouse trap, because the current mouse trap is not catching the mice. So it's not doing anything. It's not keeping anybody. It's not serving the tournaments well, it's not serving the players well.”

According to Camillo’s communique, the TAC’s mandate is to develop “actionable recommendations for consideration by the WTA Board that can be implemented as soon as the 2027 season. The Council will focus first on areas where the WTA has direct authority to drive change, while also identifying longer-term opportunities that will require broader coordination across the sport.”

The statement implicitly acknowledges the complexity of a situation to which there is no easy solution. The tour is a partnership rather than a vertical structure, in which power flows from the top down. The game is like a condominium in which players, the WTA, and the tournaments all own shares—and have voices on the board.

The Middle East tournaments in Doha and Dubai have become the poster children for a calendar that has been described as “insane” (Sabalenka), and “a madness” (Swiatek). The ATP Tour is dealing with similar conflicts between player needs and tour demands. Late last fall, ATP titan Carlos Alcaraz complained about the mandatory workload, saying, “Probably they (tour administrators) are going to kill us in some way.”

The WTA operates two mandatory 1000-level tournaments in the Middle East (Doha and Dubai) in succession, beginning just one-week after the end of the Australian Open—which itself is now a three-week extravaganza. Those tournaments ponied up financially to secure 1000-grade status (as did the promoters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, now home to the WTA Finals), providing windfall revenues for the WTA. The organization now has 10 top-tier 1000-grade events, one more than the ATP tour.

Let's get all the issues on the table, which I assume this group is going to try to do, and let's address them and try and come up with a better mouse trap, because the current mouse trap is not catching the mice. Pam Shriver

However, many of the stars on both tours are choosing to opt out of the commitments made to tournaments on their behalf. Predictably, Doha finalists Victoria Mboko and Karolina Muchova had no desire to compete in back-to-back 1000s so soon after the first major of the year. They were among the six stars who withdrew before or during the Dubai event.

This isn’t just a Middle East problem, or a February problem, or even a WTA problem. It’s a tennis problem that is also developing for other 1000s held in succession: Indian Wells/Miami, Madrid/Rome, and—most conspicuously—the midsummer Cincinnati/Canada double. Now that these Masters (ATP) and WTA 1000s are 12-day events, there is even greater incentive for players to target just one or the other, or to pull the plug after doing well in the first.

The expanding footprint of the majors also makes greater demands—and provides greater reason to take time off when they are done—on the best players. The prize-money arms race, while beneficial to players at all levels, makes it more tempting to zero in on majors to the detriment of lesser tournaments.

This chair is a big ask for Pegula. If you're a fan, you’re entitled to wonder if this is the kind of thing she needs to be doing at a time when she is still ranked No. 5, and has been making slow but very real inroads to Grand Slam singles glory. Appointing her was a neat PR move, but how much distraction from the main job can a Top 5 player tolerate?

“If her role will be to just run the meeting, I think it could be a great experience,” Shriver said. “But obviously it's really hard to do the [actual] work if you're juggling and trying to maintain Top 5 status.”

Still, kudos to any top player in this era who is willing to moonlight as the builder of a better mousetrap for her sport.