Tennis Tournament Desk Staffing Requirements

Most first-time desk managers over-plan for courts and under-plan for people. You can have every court booked correctly in a spreadsheet and still watch the queue collapse by Wednesday afternoon, because nobody was free to answer the second phone line while the WhatsApp group filled up with unread messages. Staffing is the part of the ATP and WTA practice guidelines that gets the least attention and causes the most on-the-ground stress, so it is worth working through properly before the draw even lands.

What the guidelines actually ask for

The ATP and WTA practice booking guidelines set three baseline staffing requirements for a tour-level desk: a dedicated phone line for practice requests, a dedicated WhatsApp (or equivalent messaging) line separate from any general tournament number, and a named desk manager responsible for applying the priority order. None of these are optional add-ons; they exist because a single shared inbox for practice, transport and accreditation questions guarantees that practice requests get lost in the noise during the two hours a day when everyone wants a court at once.

Why the WhatsApp line matters more than the phone

In practice, most players and coaches now message rather than call, so the WhatsApp line carries the bulk of the volume even though the guidelines list the phone first. A dedicated number means the desk can search old messages for a player's usual hitting time, forward a court change to everyone booked that hour in one go, and keep a written record of who asked for what and when. Running practice requests through a personal staff phone instead of a shared line is the single most common staffing mistake at smaller events, because it makes the whole operation depend on one person's availability.

Sizing the desk to your draw

There is no fixed ratio in the guidelines, but the pattern that experienced desks converge on tracks draw size fairly closely. Use this as a starting point and adjust for how many courts you are actually managing:

• Draw of 28-32 (small ITF/Challenger): one desk manager can usually run requests, phone and WhatsApp alone, provided qualifying and main draw don't overlap heavily
• Draw of 48-56: a desk manager plus one dedicated line-taker, so requests keep moving while the manager resolves priority disputes
• Draw of 96 (main tour 1000-level and above): a desk manager, at least two people covering the WhatsApp/phone lines during peak hours, and a runner who can physically confirm court status rather than relying on player self-reporting
• Any event running qualifying and main draw practice at the same time: add one extra line-taker for the overlap window, since request volume roughly doubles without doubling the response time available

Shift patterns across a tournament day

Desk hours at ITF and Challenger level typically run 9am to 5:30pm; tour-level desks tend to open earlier and close later to cover pre-dawn warm-up requests from players on early match schedules. The load is not flat across that window. Peak hours (usually 10am to 4pm) concentrate most of the incoming requests, so a common pattern is to run a lighter single-person opening shift, bring the full team on for the peak block, and taper back to one person for the evening tail once the next day's order of play has gone up and requests slow to a trickle.

Tour level and Challenger level staff differently, not just at different scale

It is tempting to treat Challenger staffing as simply a smaller version of a tour desk, but the shape of the job changes too, not just the headcount. Challenger and ITF World Tennis Tour events run shared courts and a single chronological queue by WhatsApp or in person, so one competent line-taker can often absorb both channels because the total volume is lower and there is no separate qualifying wave doubling requests overnight. A 1000-level desk, by contrast, is managing simultaneous streams: a large main draw, a qualifying event with its own priority rules, warm-ups tied to a published order of play, and press or broadcast enquiries landing on the same phone. That is a coordination problem as much as a volume problem, which is why the tour-level desk manager role tends to be a dedicated, full-time position for the week rather than someone's second responsibility.

The desk manager role, specifically

The desk manager is not just the most senior line-taker. Their job is to hold the priority order in their head (or, more reliably, in a system) and make the calls that a line-taker shouldn't have to: resolving a dispute between two similarly ranked players, deciding how a late withdrawal reshuffles the queue, and being the one point of contact when a coach wants to escalate. At Masters 1000-level events this is frequently a full-time role for the week; at a Challenger it is often the tournament's operations lead wearing a second hat during practice hours. Either way, everyone on the desk should know who that person is and know to route disputes to them rather than making a judgement call under pressure.

Where thin staffing breaks down first

• One line-taker covering both phone and WhatsApp during peak hours, so response times slip and players start calling twice, compounding the volume problem
• No named desk manager, so two different staff members apply the priority order slightly differently and a top player notices the inconsistency
• Court status tracked only by what players report back, so double-bookings appear when someone forgets to confirm they've finished early
• Shift handovers with no written log, so the evening team re-litigates decisions the morning team already made

What real-world staffing costs look like

Tournament operations and coordinator roles in the US were listed at roughly $15 to $48 an hour on job boards in early 2026, with the wide range reflecting everything from a part-time line-taker at a small event to a full-time operations coordinator at a larger one. It is a useful sanity check when budgeting a desk: two extra line-takers for peak hours across a week is a modest cost against the ticket and sponsorship revenue a smooth event protects, and it is considerably cheaper than the reputational cost of a top seed's team complaining publicly about court access.

Common questions

Can one person run the whole desk at a small event? Yes, at draws of 28-32 with limited overlap between qualifying and main draw, a single competent desk manager covering phone, WhatsApp and the priority order is usually enough, provided they are not also handling unrelated tournament admin during peak hours.

Does the desk manager need to be on-site at all times? Not necessarily around the clock, but they should be reachable and briefed on any live disputes during the hours courts are being requested, since delegating a priority decision to someone without full context is where inconsistency creeps in.

Should transport, accreditation and practice all share one phone number? No. Mixing general tournament queries with practice requests is the fastest way to bury a time-sensitive court request under an unrelated question about shuttle timings.

What happens if a request comes in outside desk hours? Most guidelines don't require overnight coverage, but a clear published cut-off (and an automatic acknowledgement, if the desk has one) stops a player assuming their message was seen when it wasn't, which is a more common source of complaints than the closed hours themselves.

Staffing is ultimately a demand problem wearing an HR hat: get the draw size, peak-hour overlap and warm-up load right, and the number of people (and lines) you need falls out fairly predictably. Maindraw's free practice court demand and staffing estimator applies the same ATP-style rules used above to your own draw size and court count, and the platform itself replaces the shared inbox with a single system where requests, priority and court status stay in sync across however many people are working the desk that day.