Prepared for Fifth Third Bank · Georgia · September 2026
You already buy this sport.
Fifth Third is a partner of the Cincinnati Open and puts its name on Cincy Serves. That is a bank buying tennis at the top of the sport, in a market of two million. Atlanta plays more tennis than anywhere in America, and nobody has sold it to you.
A partnership proposal · 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.
Cincinnati has a tournament. Atlanta has sixty thousand players.
The Atlanta Lawn Tennis Association was founded here in 1934 and calls
itself the largest tennis-based community organisation in the world. It reports more than
60,000 members, run by six employees. They are not spectators who like
tennis. They are adults who play it every week, in leagues, across the whole metro, and they
bank somewhere.
That is the audience a tournament rents for a week. It lives here all year.
Metro Atlanta, on a Friday night
■ The window
Eight weeks in summer, when nothing else in this city is playing.
Atlanta’s winter is crowded: the Vibe, LOVB and the Swarm all run January
to May, two of them out of the same arena, alongside college basketball. Our season is June to
August — the NBA and NHL have finished, the NFL has not started, and only baseball is
still going.
Forty-three Arcs across eight weeks, two a weekend, every one of them carried
live. An Arc is three women and three men on one shared score, about an hour and forty minutes.
Nine of last season’s events sold out.
A sponsorship that runs when nothing else does is a sponsorship people actually
see.
■ What Cincy Serves does, and what this could
You already put your name on the community half of a tennis event.
Cincy Serves is the part of the Cincinnati Open that is not the tennis
— the honourees, the local good, the reason a bank belongs there at all. It works
because a tournament gives you one week a year to do it.
Our season carries a programme of community showcases and exhibitions
across metro Atlanta alongside the Arcs, and players attend as part of the commitment. That
is eight weeks of the same instinct, in your own market, with your own customers — and
it is unsold.
The community programme
■ The open door
No bank has bought anything here.
Thirteen corporate partners signed for 2026 and not one of them is a financial
institution. The category is open, which means an exclusive is available rather than negotiable
— official banking partner of the league, with no incumbent to price against and no
competitor to displace.
The Challenge SeriesAn open-entry tournament inside every event — 16
men, 16 women, any player can enter. The top three of each earn a place on a team that then
plays a professional side.Unsold
Community programmeShowcases and exhibitions across metro Atlanta through
the season, with players present.Unsold
Broadcast and in-venueEvery Arc carried live, with in-play signage that is
broadcast signage because the court is small and the crowd is on top of it.Available
Official banking partnerCategory exclusivity across the league, its teams
and its media.Open
■ What the season already did
A second season, and the numbers that came out of it.
478,483Unique viewers across the season
43Arcs carried live, every one
254MVideo views, up 1,037% year on year
$52Average ticket
Broadcast figures from the Unbeaten Sports Channel
season report, measured to 31 August 2026. Team merchandise outsold league merchandise, which is
the number that tells you people picked a side.
■ The ask
An hour, and we will bring the inventory and the numbers.
We are not asking you to believe anything about tennis that you have not already
acted on. You bought it in Cincinnati. The argument here is only that the same sport, in the city
where more people actually play it than anywhere in the country, is available and unclaimed.
If it is worth a conversation, we will come with the full asset list, what each
piece delivered in 2026 where we can prove it, and what is still open.
