By Richard Pagliaro | @Tennis_Now | Tuesday, August 15, 2023
The WTA must clean up scheduling snafus to level the competitive playing field, says Sloane Stephens.
The Tour came under harsh criticism from some players and fans after a scheduling debacle in Montreal last week.
Rain wreaked havoc on the schedule forcing 2022 Wimbledon winner Elena Rybakina to finish a match at 3 a.m., an experience she said left her feeling “destroyed.”
Montreal runner-up Liudmila Samsonova was forced to play both the semifinal and final on the same day on Sunday and confessed she was physically depleted for the final.
Stephens, who sits on the Player Council, says the Tour and tournaments must manage the schedule better at the beginning of the week to prevent the prospect of players playing multiple matches on the final day.
“Obviously the tour has to do a better job with scheduling,” Stephens told the media in Cincinnati. “We have to find a solution for the late matches, there being unfair timing for people not playing at the same time. There are just a lot of things that need to be fixed in terms of scheduling and how we manage that, because there is obviously always going to be someone that’s at a disadvantage, as we saw in the Montreal final.
“I mean, it’s not something that we can control, but in the actuality of things, if the scheduling was better perhaps at the beginning of the week it may have made a difference towards the end of the week. Just giving players the best opportunity to perform and do their best comes down a lot to the tour and the scheduling.”
Photo credit: Getty
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