The ATP Just Started Building Formal Access for Creators. Traditional Press Already Knows How Hard That Access Is to Earn.
On August 25-26, the ATP brought a group of social media creators, nominated by TikTok, Meta, Twitch, YouTube and Snapchat, into a closed-door workshop in New York. The goal was to help the tour figure out how creators fit into tennis, formally, structurally, and at scale.
I spent the past month learning exactly how the existing system works, credential applications, mixed zones, standing at a court exit hoping to catch a player before they disappeared into the locker room. Nobody handed me a playbook for any of it. The ATP just started building one, on purpose, for a different group entirely.
What the Summit Actually Covers
The Talent Summit, moderated by Joe Sabia, former Senior Vice President of Creative Development at Condé Nast Entertainment, brought together confirmed participants including TikTok's Rachel De Mita, Meta creator Katie Feeney, Twitch's Caroline Kwan, YouTube's Shawn Johnson East and Andrew East, and Snapchat's Connor Printz. The workshop was built around three themes, how fans actually connect with players and events now, best practice for integrating creators into live tournaments, and how audiences engage differently across platforms.
Andrew Walker, ATP SVP Brand and Marketing, framed it as a natural extension of existing content partnerships with Overtime, Spotify, and TikTok. "We want creators to be part of that conversation," he said, "to understand what resonates with audiences today and help shape how tennis connects with fans in the future."
From Workshop to Policy
This wasn't just a two-day event. Insights from the Summit will feed directly into an ATP white paper, distributed across the tour later this year, giving tournaments actual practical guidance on fandom, audience engagement, and how to run a creator experience on-site. From there, ATP tournaments will get direct guidance on implementing creator access at their own events, standardizing an approach that right now varies wildly from tournament to tournament, something I can personally confirm after a month of figuring out Challenger-level access one event at a time.
The ATP already has a live program running in this space. On Tour With, launched in 2025 with TikTok, gives creators access to ATP events specifically to produce digital storytelling content. By the end of 2026, it will have run at 12 tour events.
That relationship goes back further than it might appear, and the scale behind it is real. TikTok and the ATP first announced their global content partnership in August 2025, built around a Tennis Creator Network giving creators in key cities exclusive access to tour events, plus invitations for select creators to the season-ending Nitto ATP Finals in Turin. The numbers driving that decision were significant even then: TikTok's #tennis community had passed 1.8 million posts, growing 30% in a single year, with players like Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic already building personal followings on the platform. The Talent Summit isn't a first step. It's the ATP trying to formalize and scale something that's already been running, and working, for a year.
Two Tracks, Same Access
What's genuinely interesting here isn't that the ATP is courting creators, every major sport is doing that right now. It's that they're building a formal, structured, increasingly standardized access system for it, at the exact moment traditional press access at the tournament level remains, in my direct experience, informal, inconsistent, and largely self-taught. Credential categories that vary by event. Mixed zones that exist at some tournaments and not others. No universal playbook for how a journalist actually gets a moment with a player.
The ATP is now writing that playbook, deliberately, for creators specifically. Whether traditional press access ever gets the same treatment is a fair question, and one worth watching as this white paper actually lands later in the year.
Jake Scudder
Journalist – topics of tennis