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Those lovely, pristine lawns that greet the ATP players when they arrive at Queen’s Club to prep for the grass season at Queen’s Club will be a thing of the past in 2025.

Open Court has learned the British Lawn Tennis’s request to hold a WTA 500 tournament at the posh private club the week before the longstanding, historic ATP event was approved by the ATP board at a meeting last week in Madrid.

It’s approved on a one-year basis, subject to certain conditions. The decision will be reviewed after the first edition, to see if it goes forward.

If you were wondering why the ATP had to give the nod for a WTA event, the club and the LTA would only go ahead with it if the ATP – their longtime partners and tenants – agreed to it. The men’s tournament is the reigning “tournament of the year” for the ATP at the 500 level.

And you have to wonder how much input, if any, the men’s tour players had in the decision.

(Probably, as usual, none).

This has been in the works for awhile; it would mark the first time the women have played there since 1973. And the ramifications are many and varied.

The first thing is that ATP players have always gone early to Queen’s Club to prepare for the grass-court season, before many of them play their first event on the surface at the club. For some, it’s the only grass-court event before Wimbledon.

The courts are perfect at that stage – untouched, really. And now, not only will the courts already show serious signs of wear after the women’s event, they’ll also be booked solid during that week before the tournament. And then there is the qualifying – high level competition – that will have to go at the same time as the end of the women’s event.

In a story in the Guardian a few weeks ago, the LTA’s chief executive Scott Lloyd said they had “high confidence” that the courts would stand up.

“We’ve got high confidence and we’ve got significant evidence from the All England Club as to how grass courts wear over a two-week period,” Lloyd told the Guardian. “We’ve analysed all of the data; all of the weather conditions, the density of the soil, you name it, the wear on the ‘T’ and baseline, with the view to try to make sure that we can provide the tours with confidence that the courts will be as good as they always are throughout that period.”

But they also can’t magically conjure up MORE grass courts.

The club is … a private club. Indoor spaces are pretty cramped as it is, with the clubhouse a maze of narrow hallways. When both the women and many of the men are there the same week, it’ll be an absolute clusterjam.

Who gets the better locker rooms? Who gets practice-court priority?

What else? The weather is often iffy. It wouldn’t take much to throw everything into disarray.

The club has a year to try to squeeze …. more into an already restricted space.

What about Nottingham?

What else? There are already two WTA 250s scheduled for that week, which is the week after Roland Garros. What happens to Nottingham and Birmingham, charming, low-key events that help make the grass-court season in the U.K. not just a “London” thing?

And what about the longstanding women’s event in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands? It’s sold and marketed as as a joint event with the men, with the women generally boasting a stronger field. Now, it will scramble to get decent players on the women’s side because of the new WTA rules.

The men’s tournament at Queen’s Club goes all the way back to the dawn of the Open era, when Fred Stolle won it in 1969, and Rod Laver the next year.

It was the scene for that iconic annual photo in Rafael Nadal’s earlier days, when he’d win Roland Garros – and show up the next day for a hit on the Queen’s Club lawns to prepare for Wimbledon.

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This decision will definitely make a lot of waves – especially from the ATP players. Even when word first came out that this was a possibility, the reaction was immediate.

Trickle-down effect to the 250s

For the women, it’s already becoming complicated for the women to opt for a WTA 250 over a WTA 500 if they’re held the same week, with new rules coming into play in 2024. So that will definitely affect the two events currently scheduled for that week. You would think Birmingham, in this shuffle, will be no more because the LTA owns the complex that hosts the Birmingham tournament.

Another charming event – in Eastbourne, a perfect eden of calm before the Wimbledon storm featuring both the men and the women – would be downgraded to a 250 as a result of this. Last year, more than half of the top 10 women played at Eastbourne.

A couple of years ago, Serena Williams made her (brief) return there and played doubles with Ons Jabeur – to huge attention globally.

It’s an absolutely terrific tournament in a lovely location. And it’s one of the rare ones where the men, whose tournament is a 250 and tend not to show up in huge numbers the week before a best-of-five Grand Slam tournament, definitely take the side stage. As well, it’s then a quick train ride up to London for Wimbledon, and the weather tends to be good.

The new rules would restrict that significantly.

There is a WTA 500 in Bad Homburg, Germany competing for the players that week. And so, with the new rules, you couldn’t play Eastbourne as a top-10 player unless you’re native to that country (not an issue), or are defending the title (That’s Madison Keys, not a top 10). And no more than three top-30 players in all (which would include, you would think, Keys and top Brit Katie Boulter, leaving room for just one more).

This news is just one more indication that the 250 events, which are the backbone of professional tennis and have always been up against it in terms of attracting the better players they need to make a good go of it, are on their way out.

For Lloyd, of course, it’s all about the benjamins. You know this is true whenever the suits use words like “leverage”, “invest” and “infrastructure”.

“The reality of that location [Eastbourne] is commercially limited to some degree. We just think that having a WTA 500 in week one of a three-week gap straight after Roland Garros would raise the profile of top-level tennis in that period, straight after the clay-court season,” he told the Guardian. “Given we invest in that temporary infrastructure for Queen’s each year, the ability to leverage it for a second week, given that we are investing in it in any event, is an opportunity. And we think that we will be successful in selling out and giving the women’s event that level of visibility, which is greater.”

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