Written by: Vladimir Zrinjski Photos: Domagoj Kunić
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Never before have I had so much fun at a tennis match!
Dea Herdželaš (27), currently the second best-ranked female tennis player from Bosnia and Herzegovina, offered this big hand to Time Tennis right after its launch in Makarska last October.
As a member of the Makarska Sharks team, Dea triumphed over Kaštela Knights as a woman of the match. There were many famous names from the tennis world playing their part on the court or cheering the players on from the stands – from the former Australian Open finalist Marcos Baghdatis to multiple Grand Slam champion Ivan Dodig.
“It’s not a game, it’s a sport,” said Feliks Lukas a few months later while presenting the details of the project he conceived and helped deliver. This Kaštela native, publicly known as the director of the WTA 125 Makarska Open tournaments, is the mastermind behind Time Tennis, a new sport that he and his team are currently trying to put on the global map.
Time Tennis is similar to “regular” tennis in terms of courts, equipment, and basic rules, and yet it’s a whole different ball game. Lukas describes it as tennis on steroids, since there is less idle time and more effort to hold the attention of the spectators, both those in the stands and those who watch the match on TV. We ask him where he got the idea for this “prance prance revolution”.
– Same way all good ideas come to pass: I was at a bar with my friend, and some liquid courage got my creative juices flowing. A draw in the overall game of tennis, the decline in the popularity of the sport, and especially the nosedive the already lower ranks of the game took have vexed me for years. Before the current WTA tournament, I organised ITF tournaments in Bol. At this level, there are a number of players who are very marketable, but they haven’t been afforded the same opportunities for progress as those at the top. I’ve also encountered issues related to TV rights holders, such as scheduling conflicts. I realised just how silly it is that you never know when the match starts and when it ends, so every so often no one even wants to broadcast matches.

And that’s how I came to the idea of tennis played on time – Lukas starts the ball rolling.
If it weren’t for the dark times of coronavirus and the lockdown, maybe the idea would never see the light of day, but this particular period gave him time to do research and recruit people who would be unavailable under normal circumstances.
– I called up some members of the ATP and WTA teams, and presented the idea to them as the next step in the evolution of this sport. That’s why we called it Time Tennis: to build on the development of tennis over time. Tennis has always been referred to in terms descriptive of the game – from “jeu de paume”, “royal tennis”, and “lawn tennis” played on grass, to the modern version. Tennis has evolved ball in hand with society, but originally, during the Industrial Revolution, it was based on completely different ideas. Back then, the United Kingdom was a superpower whose upper classes needed a sport to pass the time and disport themselves. Both men and women would play tennis at their country houses for five days straight, so it’s obvious these people had plenty of free time – he says.
Today, in this era of fast-paced life, globalisation, new technologies, and social media, the concept of time has broken with the past. Lukas vividly illustrates this with a common example from tennis tournaments.
– If I invite you to catch my sister’s match (Tena Lukas, mid-March ranking 205, author’s comment), in most cases you’ll have no idea when it starts or when it ends. Even if you want to be a die-hard fan, tennis doesn’t give you the chance for that because it’s insufficiently geared to the times in which we live and the way the world works now.
Of course, the unpredictability of the schedule was not Lukas’s only motive for launching Time Tennis.
– We were aiming for a holistic approach which would allow us to deal with all the major problems in tennis, from tanking and match-fixing to the unequal distribution of money. We were looking for a grand slam model which would significantly increase the tennis players’ quality of life. Let me ask you this: is it acceptable that the 200th player in the world, who is, for example, 27 years old and has more than enough professional experience, isn’t well – or even okay-off but rather financially dependent on their parents?


Lukas is not the first to introduce a different model of tennis: there were others who made a pitch for it in the midst of the pandemic, starting with Patrick Mouratoglou, Serena Williams’s former coach, who still organises his Ultimate Tennis Showdown league. There is, however, a huge tie-breaker.
– He only includes the best players in his show, while we, on the other hand, had a league of doctors play according to the rules of Time Tennis in 2020 in Brazil. Then came the demo event in Makarska, followed by the tournament in Solin, where there were about 50 amateurs playing for sheer pleasure. That gave us a huge boost. This concept is a no brainer for professional players since it provides them with a different financial model and a higher quality of life, giving them a secure income and their fair share of the prize pool… Time Tennis is conceived as the first “gender equal” professional sports league in the world. We got men, women, and mixed doubles, and the structure is similar to that of Formula 1. All teams come to the same location and play there for the duration of the competition, which amounts to four days.
Now we come to the most interesting part. According to the calculations of Lukas and his team, active play in Time Tennis, i.e. the duration of the points in relation to the duration of the match, amounts to 67 percent, while in regular tennis it makes up 18 percent. On paper, this seems like a huge difference, and it is logically reflected in audience engagement and interest. Lukas goes on to explain that tennis as a sport has “the largest passive fanbase”.
– People will tell you they are tennis fans without having watched a match in three years. That’s incredible information if you want your sport to hinge on passionate fans. I know this from my own example; I rarely watch a match in its entirety. And even if I do watch it, how do I do it? Let’s say Čilić starts the match with a serve, so until the first break I got time to send an email, call a friend, cook some spaghetti… This is where the battle for consumer’s attention begins.
When developing Time Tennis, they put focus on the simplicity of the rules. They recently organised a junior tournament in Tampa, where they laid out the rules of the new concept to 14-year-old children who have been practicing “real” tennis for years.
– At the end, we asked them to explain the rules back to us, and each child was able to summarise them succinctly. Then we urged them to give us the main points of the regular tennis rules, and many were confused and couldn’t clearly rehash them, even though they had played the sport for years. Our goal is for everyone involved to get as much as possible out of it – from players, spectators, and the media to sponsors.

The rules seem pretty black and white in black and white. The duel comprises four quarters of ten minutes each, and the player serves until a fault. The point gained is worth one point, unless it’s a winner, which equals two points. A winner or a direct point can be easily recognised by the spectators – if the opponent didn’t touch the ball with the racquet, it’s a winner. If they touched it, even just with the racquet’s edge, the winner amounts to love. In short, there is no grey area. – Lukas singles out some other special features of Time Tennis.
– The player serving chooses the side for their first serve, except in the case of the so-called “sudden death” points, in which the returner chooses a side. There are no lets and there’s no downtime – the match stops only if they call a timeout during the quarter. Breaks between points can last a maximum of 20 seconds.
We were also eager to find out what exactly “sudden death” means…
– That’s the deciding point in the event of a tie. It sure brings a lot of heat. It’s interesting that in the last 20 seconds of the quarter the clock is stopped, just like in basketball. And at this point, the result can change up to six, seven times. The player can hit an ace in but two seconds. There was a case at an amateur tournament where the score was 44-43, with a hundredth of a second left until the end. The player who was losing the entire match ended up winning, and you know how? The rule is that once started, the point must be played even if the siren sounds. His opponent could have missed on purpose, and it would have been a draw, but he went for a dropshot, and since the player who was losing had nothing to lose, he automatically relaxed his hand, “whammed” the ball and hit the winner. He got two points, winning game, set and match!
The spectators’ readiness to accept new rules was best seen at the test event in Makarska. Lukas says that at one point, Baghdatis approached him and remarked how engaged the spectators were.
– Mind you, the stadium was jam-packed the entire time – no one wanted to leave before the end, including the people in their 80s. It was also interesting to observe the reactions of the tennis players. When they heard the game-changing concept of Time Tennis and got a grip of the game, some reacted as if their livelihood has already been ensured. Ivo Karlović told me that he would come out of retirement in the blink of an eye just to give a shot to Time Tennis… But our goal is to attract active players and professionals; after all, we are building a professional sports structure.
We also got positive feedback from both male and female ATP big-leagues, although it’s hard for them to find their tactical footing in the beginning – Lukas points out.

– Time Tennis is a whole new ball game, so amateur players will get into it much faster because their brains adapt to the rules more easily. A professional player’s brain has already been programmed to follow the code of regular tennis. At first, we wanted the matches to last 60 minutes, but we had to reduce it to 40 precisely because the players can’t endure it physically. Which comes as a surprise in the case of professionals who play matches for up to four or five hours. Time Tennis is much more intense, so the difference is huge. You get more points in 40 minutes than in three hours of regular tennis. Everything is compressed.
In addition to modernising the sport that has been entrenched in the net of traditional rules for decades, the basic mission of the TT team is making life easier for tennis players.
– Our goal is to turn these stars into supernovas that shine brighter than the Top 20 ATP players at the moment by involving them in our out-of-this-world version of tennis. The distribution of money has gone in the wrong direction – just look at what the Saudis are doing… We’re even thinking of introducing a rule for every team in Time Tennis to include one tennis player in a wheelchair. It would be a full-on revolution, something never seen before in any sport.
Lukas says that the first two Time Tennis competitions have been duly applauded to the echo and is already announcing the upcoming six competitions that will take place in the USA, Canada, and Mexico later this year. This will be a big-league try-out before Time Tennis expands across the Old Continent in 2025, with a potential play-off between the best teams from Europe and America. The venue we have in mind for that event is the Pula Arena.
– We reached out to the director of ATP Dubai, Salah Tahlak, and then Gustavo Santoscoy, the man who took tennis in Mexico to another level… Many want to join our cause without even having seen how it all plays out on the court, and I already see enormous potential here.
However, if the story unfolds according to Lukas’s ideas, at some point Time Tennis will have to square off with regular tennis over audiences. The question is, therefore, whether the players will take this risk and give up the potential gains, however modest they may be at smaller tournaments.
– They’d surely have to take six weeks off, but we believe that their quality of life would improve right from the start. There was a shift in perception during the coronavirus epidemic, when certain tennis players were forced to auction their belongings in order to survive. Forget about Wimbledon – give me my daily bread. After we’re done with the first full season, they won’t even have the need to play the ATP Tour. All the players who participated in the demo event in Makarska keep asking when we’ll get the ball rolling because they say they want a change. We’ve planned a mini USA tour for September, and in the meantime, we’re working on securing funds, bringing in more sponsors and laying the groundwork.
As our interview nears its end, we ask Lukas how much time promoting Time Tennis takes away from preparing the next WTA Makarska Open, the only Croatian women’s tennis tournament which will be held this year from June 3 to June 9.
– This will be the eighth WTA Makarska Open in history. Sometimes I watch from the sidelines while my older sister Tajna, who was a tennis player and has a master’s degree in kinesiology, takes care of various operational matters – after all, she’s way more experienced than me when it comes to that. On the other hand, I’ve been developing the Time Tennis project for five years, even though it’s only now seen the light of day. And we need all hands on deck in order for it to be smooth sailing in the future. I am honoured that it all started with me, right here in Croatia, but now we have international partners and most of the crew is from North America, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic.
As for Makarska, we still want it to act as a springboard for our female tennis players who otherwise don’t have the opportunity to play at the WTA level, at the same time adding value to the location itself. We’re currently working on ensuring broadcasts from day one, so the viewers have the opportunity to see these girls on TV. The tournament proved to be the most favourable wind in the sails of our Croatian female tennis players, such as Petra Martić, Ana Konjuh, or Tara Wűrth, and we’re sure they’ll stay the course.