A Host of Challenges Greet WTA’s New Leader

Steve Simon with Maria Sharapova on Sunday at the WTA Finals in Singapore. At right, the chair umpire Eva Asderaki.

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Matthew Stockman/Getty Images for WTA 

At age 60, Steve Simon said, he had planned to spend the rest of his career as the tournament director and chief operating officer at the Indian Wells tennis event in California.

Who could have blamed him? The tournament in the desert is thriving, widely considered the best in the world after the four Grand Slam events.

But Simon’s professional path abruptly changed when Stacey Allaster made her surprise decision to resign as chief executive of the Women’s Tennis Association last month. Without summoning so much as a search committee, the WTA board of directors offered the job to Simon, a longtime board member himself, who did not take long to accept.

“There are not too many times you have boards in our world of tennis that are that united and wanting to offer it to me without going through a public process,” Simon said in a recent telephone interview. “I certainly would have regretted it if I hadn’t taken the chance.”

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His arrival at the WTA comes as the tour is still searching for a lead global sponsor and other fresh sources of revenue. It also comes amid concerns about the structure of the tour calendar, particularly at the end of the season, and about the ability of players to stay healthy, despite the 2009 expansion of the off-season, which is now at eight weeks.

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“It absolutely is creating problems, and the women are having a difficult time getting through it,” Simon said of the schedule, which he said he did not intend to extend. “We have to become more disciplined within that calendar so we are putting premium products on the court and getting players rest and still working within that 44-week window. The one thing I don’t want to do is compress it so players are playing more in a lesser period of time, because that’s not healthy.”

Simon is supportive of the WTA’s on-court coaching initiative, which has drawn mixed reviews. He also said the tour should continue to examine the so-called grunting issue, which has been polarizing, but he suggested that “it is best addressed in the development years.”

After the WTA’s rapid expansion in Asia, chiefly in China, Simon sounds ready to focus on other regions.

“We need to make sure we respect the region and don’t oversaturate it,” he said of the Asia-Pacific region. “We’ll continue to look at new opportunities around the world where it makes sense, but this truly is a global tour, and I think we need to have balance. You need North America. You need Asia. You need Europe. You need to be looking into some other markets, because there are obviously some big ones out there that we don’t have a lot of tennis in — South America, and India is another.”

Simon’s arrival provides tennis — a sport hamstrung by its fragmented power structure — with a clear opportunity for greater cooperation on thorny issues like conflicts in commercial sponsorship and the Davis Cup and Fed Cup national team events.

The major leadership posts in the professional game have all changed hands recently. Chris Kermode, a Briton, took over as head of the men’s tour in November 2013, and Dave Haggerty, an American, became president of the International Tennis Federation last month.

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Simon, Haggerty and Kermode know one another well and share common ground. All were fine amateur players who tried and failed to match that success on the men’s professional tour. Simon and Haggerty played in college, Simon at Long Beach State and Haggerty at George Washington. Kermode, like Simon, was a tournament director before taking over the ATP.

All three are former tennis coaches. Unlike some previous WTA and ATP leaders, they came into their jobs already knowing the game and its politics. They also have strong connections with the sport’s other major power bloc, the leaders of the Grand Slam tournaments. Haggerty, 58, was part of that bloc during a two-year term in 2013 and 2014 as president of the United States Tennis Association, and he is close to the current U.S.T.A. president, Katrina Adams.

“We are heading into maybe a unique situation here,” Simon said. “We all know each other, so going in, if there was any ill will or bad blood, it’s gone. There’s no reason we shouldn’t have full respect for everybody. We may not always agree on everything, but we can certainly have extensive conversations and open conversations, and I think we will.”

They have already started. Since Simon’s election, Haggerty has met with Kermode and spoken at length with Simon and with Micky Lawler, the WTA’s president, who also has been in her post for only about a year.

“It does seem like the stars are finally aligning to get some unification and to get on the same page to really make some interesting things happen,” Lawler said last week. “The division within tennis has been kind of mind-boggling on many fronts.”

Under Allaster and the former I.T.F. president Francesco Ricci Bitti, an Italian who held the top job for 16 years, there was friction over Fed Cup, the women’s team event owned by the I.T.F., and Olympic eligibility requirements.

“It’s very important,” Haggerty said of mending fences with the WTA.

Craig Tiley, the chief executive of Tennis Australia and tournament director of the Australian Open, agreed that the situation was promising but said that he feared there were still too many impediments to significant change in the I.T.F., ATP and WTA governance structures.

“We’re traditionally a highly conservative sport, and that needs to change for us to become a mainstream sport,” he said. “Because we are kidding ourselves if we think our sport is growing.”