ITF will increase girls’s tournaments in first quarter of 2023 season

The Worldwide Tennis Federation (ITF) has elevated the variety of girls’s tournaments it should organise through the first quarter of 2023 to 114, with a file $3.3 million on supply for gamers as a part of its push for gender parity.

Ladies’s occasions on the schedule from Jan. 1 to March 30 are up 15 on 2022, with a brand new W40 stage of competitors value $40,000 in prize cash that will increase tournaments above the $15,000 and $25,000 entry class to 150.

The world governing physique of tennis added that the whole prize cash on the 2023 ITF Ladies’s World Tennis Tour – which supplies entry-level and mid-level tournaments – would additionally enhance by 10% to a file $16.5 million.

The $3.3 million complete prize cash on supply within the first quarter represents a 25% enhance on the identical interval in 2022 and a 50% enhance on 2019, it mentioned.

Two-times singles Grand Slam champion Mary Pierce, who’s on the ITF Board of Administrators and chairs its girls’s participant panel, mentioned that the physique was dedicated to gender equality and inclusion in any respect ranges globally.

“We’ve put a number of give attention to this by means of our Benefit All dedication designed to develop tennis as an equal alternatives sport,” Pierce mentioned in an announcement.

“That’s been driving a number of funding, selections and motion within the skilled sport, together with the creation of the W40 class of tournaments introduced at this time.

“We’ve additionally labored onerous to construction a calendar of alternatives for women and men on the ITF World Tennis Tour that makes enjoying and touring simpler to schedule and cheaper for our skilled gamers, coaches and households.”

The calendar additionally options greater than 100 occasions for males on the M15 and M25 ranges, with over $2 million prize cash on supply for the primary time