Katrina Adams had a fair bit of success when she was a top doubles player during the 1980s and 1990s.
She won the NCAA doubles title in 1987, then went on to win 20 doubles titles on the pro tour and reached the quarterfinals or better in doubles at all four Grand Slam events. Pretty good. Winning never gets old, but Adams, the first Black person to lead the United States Tennis Association, experienced a different sort of satisfaction recently when she got a call from the International Olympic Committee and learned she was being named its ‘Gender Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’ Champion for 2023.
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The GEDI Champion, previously known as the Women and Sport Award, recognizes the work of a person or an organization in opening up sports to lesser-served groups, something that was a hallmark of Adams’ tenure running the USTA.
“Thrilled, honored and humbled,” Adams, who grew up in Chicago and attended Northwestern University, said of the award, though she very quickly made it clear she never set out on this path for the acclaim. “The work that I do is not to be recognized or to be receiving awards for it. It’s because it’s from the heart. These are things that I believe in.”
No one would argue with that. As a vice-president at the International Tennis Federation, Adams spearheaded the Advantage All program, which pushes for equality between men and women in the sport among other efforts. She is also a longtime board member of the Harlem Junior Tennis and Education program.
Adams spoke with The Athletic recently about diversity and inclusion in tennis, on the court and off it, and what the sport needs to do to get more women in the coaching box.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your efforts to open up the sport and to drive equality have been a hallmark of your career in sports. Why have you dedicated so much of your work to that?
I was a player first. A player who came up through grassroots, played grassroots tennis, junior high school, collegiate, played professional tennis. And when you come from a diverse background, and being an African American in America, it’s challenging and there are obstacles that are in place.
And so you recognize how difficult it can be for people who look like you or people who are different in a sport that isn’t always welcoming. And so, as I got older and had opportunities to use my voice and use my platform to hopefully make it easier for others, that’s exactly what I did.
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I wanted to make sure that everyone knew that they had a place in our sport in the U.S. When I went outside of our borders and I became a part of the ITF as a vice-president, you know, the world is large and there are so many other nationalities out there. It became my mission to focus on gender equality and that became my ultimate goal: to make sure that I was spreading that and speaking that everywhere because that’s where we were lacking the most globally.
How so?
Making sure that we had leaders at every pillar of our sport — not just on the court and on the field, but as leaders in our game in the boardroom and on committees and commissions.
What does American tennis get right about both inclusion and what does it need to do to get better?
American tennis has done a lot right for inclusion. It goes back to Althea Gibson breaking the color barrier back in the 1950s to just get into the sport first and foremost. And Arthur Ashe, starting the NJTL (the National Junior Tennis and Learning network). There are so many programs in inner cities, in particular, to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to get a racket in their hand and to play tennis. There’s funding in place to make sure these kids can stay engaged in our sport.
But tennis is a repetitive sport. It takes a lot of time, a lot of nurturing, a lot of equipment, a lot of coaching. To be the best, there’s a lot that goes into it and not everybody is meant to be a champion or competitive. But if you look at who we have on the professional tours and in the pipeline and the juniors and in the collegiate ranks, there are people of color that are developing and coming up.
The mantra over the years is trying to make tennis look like America and that means whatever the demographics of the U.S. are, we want to make sure that tennis looks like that.
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Can the rest of the world learn from what America has done?
You have to understand what the other goals of the countries are. American politics are very different from other countries’ politics when it comes to sport, diversity and inclusion. The definition of diversity in the U.S. is very different to what diversity looks like in other nations. Because of what our country was built on and what it stands for. So you have to ask those nations, ‘What does that actually look like?’.
What that means is, when I’m sitting on the ITF (board), our focus is making sure that there are opportunities for everyone to play the sport of tennis. We’re always looking at able bodies and non-able bodies, which is inclusive of wheelchair tennis, as well as gender equality.It’s about making sure you have women who are making decisions for women, because it’s very difficult for men to tell me what I need and what I don’t need.
We need more women on the boards of our national associations or our national or international federations for the athletes. We have a ton of women on our board (at the USTA). I’m not so certain that’s the same around the world within the other federations.
There is a new understanding that coaching girls and women is different from coaching boys and men, that equality is not just giving the same, but equality is giving what that specific gender needs. Where do you come down on that?
Coaching is coaching when it comes to X’s and O’s, tactics and the physicality of the sport. Understanding personalities is where there is a difference. Women can coach men and men can coach women. I don’t think that there is a certain need that men only coach men and women only coach women.
We need to get off of this gender-only coaching thing, but we need to have more women in coaching for women because of the sensitivities as far as the emotions are concerned — but we also need to have more women coaching men because of the sensitivities of women understanding men. Men have grown up under their mothers and can communicate a little bit differently with women. Just ask Andy Murray. He was a huge advocate of having female coaches and was very successful with female coaches.
(Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
We do have a lack of women coaching, period, in all sports. That’s an area that needs to be elevated.
How do you do that? How do you get more women coaches, especially in tennis?
That is constantly discussed. There is no cookie-cutter process when you’re hiring coaches. Concessions need to be made, particularly when you’re hiring younger coaches who may be mothers, or young mothers. You have to bake in maternity leave. You have to bake in, perhaps, nurseries at the clubs if they have young kids that they have to bring in. You have to understand that we are different and that we do have different needs than your male coaches.
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If our men can start to understand the differences as to what our women do need, then maybe the conversation can change. Maybe the numbers can grow and then maybe these clubs can actually be a little more successful because they understand that, if you bring in the women into these conversations and have a little more diversity of thought in the room and have these conversations, they will actually flourish. And the sky is the limit as to what we can do in business, if we have more women in the room to have those conversations.
(Top photo: Nicole Pereira / USTA)
