Prepared for prospective Newport Beach owners · A team charter · November 2026
Newport Beach has played this game before.
For most of two decades, professional team tennis was a summer night out in Newport Beach: club courts, a home crowd close enough to hear the players, and three league titles. The league behind it stopped after 2021. This page makes the case for the version that stays — the Rips, a professional team the county owns, with three women and three men playing for one score.
The Rips · At home in Newport Beach · Eleven sections, about seven minutes
In the stands at INTENNSE Arena · Season 2
A gender-balanced Professional Team Tennis League
Eight playing weeks in the middle of the summer. Switch the view to see the same season against the American sports year, or against the college calendar our players come from.
Where our players have been on the tour, and where they sit on the rating that covers everyone. The orange rule is where tennis starts paying for itself.
UTR: our players against the tour’s
Down to the wire; Sudden Death
Two Arcs that finished a point apart. Each clip picks up in the closing minutes, with the full Arc a click away.
Sudden death, level at 142
The final three minutes of Freeze v Rise, 20 June. The clock runs out with the teams tied, and the next point decides it: 143–142.
Match Center ↗One point, one minute left
The final minute of Outriders v Inferno, 25 June. It finishes 150–149, with the winner’s cheque on court.
Match Center ↗Two points that flipped the score
One from the net, one from the low camera. Each is about twenty seconds, and each one changed the scoreboard.
Low angle, the final Bolt
The last play of the Bolt from the low camera: a two-pointer that takes the Sting from 86–87 to 88–87. 22 seconds.
Match Center ↗Mixed doubles, last seconds
Dalayna Hewitt’s two-pointer in the closing seconds against Rise, 15 July — 156 to 158, level. 18 seconds.
Match Center ↗■ The tennis already here
Seventeen seasons of team tennis, and a tour event Taylor Fritz won twice.
World TeamTennis played in Newport Beach from 2003, first as the city’s team and from 2012 as the county’s, and won the league in 2004, 2017 and 2021. Lindsay Davenport, Pete Sampras and Maria Sharapova all played for the team. It was a club-court product, a thousand or so seats around a stadium court, and it ended when its league stopped.
The events and the courts
From 2018 to 2020 Newport Beach hosted a combined ATP Challenger and WTA 125 in the last week of January. Taylor Fritz won the men’s title twice; Danielle Collins and Bianca Andreescu won the women’s, and Jessica Pegula reached the 2019 final. Since then the county’s professional tennis has come down to an occasional $15,000 ITF week in Irvine.
The courts are still here: two Newport Beach clubs with stadium courts that have staged professional tennis, the Racquet Club of Irvine’s twenty-eight courts, and the Palisades club where the United States played a Davis Cup quarter-final in 1997. The racquet business is thriving too: the PPA Tour’s Newport Beach Open lists more than a million dollars in payouts for 2027.
As Newport Beach’s, then Orange County’s team, 2003–2021.
2004, 2017 and 2021.
World TeamTennis relaunches in December with three clubs, none in California.
■ The calendar
Beach volleyball opens in May. Late May to early July is open.
Orange County’s summer runs on the coast. Beach volleyball opens its season at Huntington Beach in mid-May; the county fair and the US Open of Surfing take the second half of July. Between them, the Ducks are off and no professional team in the county plays indoors. That is where our weeks fall.
The AVP opener
Beach volleyball’s season starts at Huntington Beach.
The team
A professional season of evening matches, three women and three men on one score.
The fair and the surf
The OC Fair in Costa Mesa and the US Open of Surfing at the pier.
The Games
Los Angeles hosts the Olympics from 14 July; Anaheim hosts the volleyball.
Playing in an Olympic summer
2028 is the season every INTENNSE team moves to its own city, and it is also the summer the Games come to Southern California. We would plan the first home season to finish before the Olympics begin, and open it as part of the run-up: a county full of visiting sport, and a new team that plays before anyone else has started.
Newport Beach averages; evening tennis outdoors is a real option here.
Honda Center in Anaheim hosts indoor volleyball.
The FIVB final rounds come to Anaheim.
■ The audience
No women’s professional team plays in Orange County.
The county is building a name in women’s sport — the volleyball world championship in 2027, the Olympic tournament in 2028 — but it has no women’s professional team of its own. INTENNSE is built for that audience: three women and three men on every team, and one score in which a woman’s point counts exactly as much as a man’s.
Why a tennis team adds to it
The people who run multi-team organisations report that men’s and women’s fan bases barely overlap, even in the same city and the same arena. A team with women and men on one roster, playing for one score, reaches both in a single night out.
And this is a county that plays: one Newport Beach racquet club alone has nearly two thousand members, and families like theirs are the audience a summer team is built for.
■ The players
Two of the tour’s young Americans grew up down the road.
Learner Tien started on the public courts of Irvine, where his father taught, and climbed to No. 21 in the world in May. Alex Michelsen, from Aliso Viejo, reached the quarter-finals of this year’s US Open. Tien’s coach is the county’s own: Michael Chang grew up here and still runs his foundation from Rancho Santa Margarita.
From the county’s courts to the pros
UC Irvine’s men won the Big West in 2022, 2024 and 2025, and Cal State Fullerton’s women topped the conference this spring. Chapman and Concordia Irvine field programmes too, and USC, UCLA and Pepperdine are within the hour.
College to professional is the route most of our players took, except that most of them arrive in the ranks where tennis does not yet pay for itself. The chart in the bar at the top of this page shows where the league’s selected players sit against the tour.
Junior
Club and public-court clinics across the county, in the team format.
School
High-school tennis on the same rules, and a ballkeeper programme on the pro court.
College
UC Irvine, Cal State Fullerton, Chapman and Concordia, open to player selection.
The team
A professional place on the Rips, in front of the home crowd.
■ The ground
A five-thousand-seat arena five miles from the harbor.
The Bren Events Center at UC Irvine seats just under five thousand for court sport, and its tenants play in winter and spring. It is the right size for a team that wants every seat close to the court.
Where it could play
An INTENNSE Arc needs one court, a clock and a crowd close to it; our arena in Atlanta is 30,000 square feet. Newport Beach also has something most cities don’t: a sunken stadium court that has already staged a professional team and a tour event, in a climate where an outdoor evening session is a feature rather than a risk.
The choice would be made with the owner, and it is one of the things 2026–27 is for.
■ The local business
Newport Beach companies already put their names on sport.
Hoag’s name is on the Hoag Classic, and from 2027 on one of senior golf’s majors. Chipotle, headquartered in Newport Beach, ran a promotion on every Taylor Fritz win at this year’s US Open. Pacific Life is a PGA Tour partner and helped raise more than $25 million for Hoag in a single March week. The sponsors a local owner would call are already spending on sport, and some of them have backed team tennis here before.
What stays with the team
Local sponsorship, ticketing, hospitality and activations belong to the charter holder, not the league. When team tennis last played here, its sponsors were local — a hospital, a car dealer, an orthopaedic group, the county magazine — and one season’s profits went to the Hoag Hospital Foundation. That is the model a local owner inherits.
■ What Season 2 did in Atlanta
A season that already sells.
Ten teams, eight weeks, fifty-four Arcs, forty-three of them Pro Arcs. Season 2 closed on 1 August with Freeze beating Outriders 137–130, and 2027 grows to sixty-five Pro Arcs, with every team playing two a week.
The local business in Atlanta
By midseason, attendance was more than four times the year before and had already passed the whole of 2025. Thirteen sponsors signed, twelve of them through relationships already in the city, with Atlanta-based Cellairis as Founding Partner. The average ticket sold for $52, and team merchandise outsold league merchandise.
Eleven community events drew 770 people off the couch and onto a court. Those are the numbers a local owner inherits and builds on.
The Rules of INTENNSE, explained · 2:04
Average across forty airings on Peachtree; the best single Arc drew 116,000.
Record live concurrents across the final series.
Two broadcast, two RSNs, seven FAST, three streaming — 60% of watch time on TV.
■ What an owner holds
A ten-year charter for Orange County, at home in Newport Beach.
Owners hold an exclusive Team Charter: MLS-style, geographically bound economic rights, not a traditional franchise. Ten years, renewing in five-year terms. The team is the Rips, a name a surf coast needs no help to read, and Sloane Stephens is its Pulse Partner. Whether it carries the city’s name or the county’s is a conversation we would rather have with you than settle on a page.
The league keeps
- Game
- Format, rules, schedule, officiating
- Brand
- League marks and national sponsorship
- Rights
- Media and data rights
The owner holds
- Team
- Operations and team marks in the territory
- Revenue
- Local sponsorship, ticketing, hospitality, activations
- Content
- Local content within league rules
- Share
- Team merchandise, and a share of pooled league revenue
2026–27
The league operates the team and secures venues while Newport Beach events begin to build its audience, and the owner learns the business from inside it.
2028
The Rips move home. The owner appoints a GM, takes ticketing, hospitality and venue, and inherits a community playbook proven over three years in Atlanta.
2029 on
Scale — and a share of the fees from every charter the league sells after the initial offering.
The road League One Volleyball took
LOVB ran every team from the centre in its first season, let local operators take local sponsorship in its second, and by its third the operators ran everything off the court. The league kept athlete selection, rosters, national sponsorship and media. One of its best markets, by its own account, is Madison, Wisconsin, and New York is not next on its list. Our charter follows the same order: two seasons inside the business, then the team goes home.
How the economics are built
The owner keeps the large majority of the revenue the team earns locally. Separately, a share of league revenue is pooled and distributed across the teams, so an owner participates in the league’s growth as well as the team’s. From 2029, owners also share in expansion fees as the league adds cities: a home market for every team by 2028, and a market we believe will carry thirty or more teams by 2035.
It is a franchise-value investment first, and the operating model takes several seasons to turn cash-positive. We’ll walk you through that model, line by line, in the room rather than on a page.
■ What early looks like
The first owners in a league buy the cheapest seats it will ever sell.
That is the pattern in every emerging league that lasted.
What we are not claiming
Not every new league lasts, and nothing about the ones that did is a promise about this one. Newport Beach knows that better than most: its last team-tennis league stopped in 2021. In Major League Pickleball, teams that changed hands for around $100,000 in 2021 were valued near $10 million two years later; other ventures of the same era are gone.
The argument is only this. If team tennis becomes a real league in America, the charters sold before 2029 will have been the cheap ones. We think Season 2 is the evidence that it will.
■ Who you would be building with
The people behind the league.
■ Pulse Partners, by team
A Pulse Partner is an ambassador, not an owner.
■ Why we sent this
We’re looking for the Rips’ owners.
What we cannot show you yet: we have never played an Arc in Orange County. There is no home venue signed, no local staff and no Newport Beach season behind the Rips. Everything on this page is either the league’s record in Atlanta or the county’s own. The rest would be built with you.
A local group for a team that stays: people who remember summer tennis nights in Newport Beach, and want the version that does not go away.
Where an hour could lead
We’ll bring the charter, the model and the transition plan, and answer every question about them. If it’s worth a second hour, we’d rather it were courtside in Atlanta than in a conference room.
The charter
Terms, territory and the path from league-operated to owner-operated, walked through in full.
The home
The Bren Events Center or a stadium court on the coast: dates, seats and what each night would look like.
The first night
A Newport Beach exhibition before 2028 to introduce the Rips to the county.
The model
Revenue lines, breakeven and the years to cash-positive — the numbers we left off this page on purpose.
