Learning to Love Tennis

Learning to Love Tennis is a cool infographic describing the major changes within the USTA’s rules for kids playing tennis.  Designed by Digital Surgeons, the infographic visualizes some the biggest changes like court sizes, raquet sizes and net height.  Also, including things like comparing the calorie burn of different sports help show the reader why tennis is such a great sport for kids.

The game of tennis has been scaled for youth play.  To date, tennis has been the only major sport without equipment and field of play dimensions specific to children.  By introducing smaller and lighter racquets, balls with different compression ratios, lower nets and scaled court sizes, kids can begin playing and competing earlier.  Earlier participation and play increases engagement and reduces frustration associated with using adult-sized racquets that kids find clunky and heavy, or court sizes that are simply too large for children to effectively navigate.  Far too many of our country’s youth are huddled around the TV or tethered to a video game controller.  These new rules provide the means to get kids off the couch and engage in an activity that they can continue for life.

Overall, I really like this design.  The style is eye-ctaching and information is laid out in an easy-to-read manner.  I like most of the visuals, and there are only a couple things I would change:

• The grid of 30 kid icons showing 70% of Kids Quit Sports isn’t accurate.  The visual is 22/30 kids , which is 73.3%  This type of visual always works better as a grid of 100.  Don’t make your readers count icons to figure out what you’re showing them.  Rows of 6 are just odd, and tought to understand.
• One of the biggest differences is the new balls used by different ages.  It would have been nice to visualize the difference in bounce for each ball to help the reader understand.
• The Average Height, Stride Comparison and Average Weight is lost in the design, because it’s all text.  In an infographic that makes it less important and the reader just skips over that section.
• At the bottom should be the URL to the official landing page so readers can find the original infographic.

This is a really huge initialative for the USTA, and the new rules are complicated to understand for parents.  An infographic is a fantastic way to simplify their message, and I think this will help them out a lot.

Thanks to Pete for sending in the link!