In order to promote my new-ish pyramid competition, I have been hosting tournaments at various venues across London. They have been mixed singles events at LTA Grade 6 (British Tour is Grades 1-2, Regional/County is Grades 3-5, 6 is local matchplay, 7 is internal club). In return for clubs providing courts/floodlights I have been providing organisation and match balls and free entry to club members for up to 50% of the draw. Using the FAST4 scoring format it is possible to play a 16 player main draw with consolation draw in roughly 4 hours on 4 courts.

I've really enjoyed running these tournaments (I also play in them myself) and the feedback from players and clubs has been great and most of the clubs now want to run further tournaments.
Over the last six months of visiting new clubs and meeting lots of new people it has made me realise quite a few things:

1. The vast majority of tennis club members play zero tournaments - with potential exception of their own club's annual annual club championships (and not every club runs one of these)
2. A lot of clubs have spare court capacity and dwindling membership
3. Most clubs do not run any external tournaments (that allow non-members to enter)
4. Most tennis club members don't want to travel anywhere else, other than their own club, to play tennis
5. Most tennis club members have a british tennis rating of 10.2 or 9.2 i.e. they have never played matches that even count towards their rating moving up

Receiving such good feedback has really inspired me to run more tournaments in 2020. I'm planning to go from one a month to one a week. Each week moving to some other part of London. Unfortunately I don't have enough spare personal time to do this myself, so I am going to have to find some volunteers to help me organise them. I've a feeling that the more players who can experience a really fun singles tournament, at their own club, will then be inspired to play at least another one at their own club...or perhaps even another one at a nearby club! If we can greatly increase the number of tournament players at this very low recreational level, I think this will potentially do wonders for tennis participation at all levels in the UK.