Service winner: Sports exec overcomes long odds to pull off premier event

In tennis, love means nothing, and nothing is what longtime USTA and WTA executive Stacey Allaster had to work with, in terms of precedent, when staging the U.S. Open amid a global pandemic.

By Brian Hartz
| 6:00 a.m. October 9, 2020
| 0 Free Articles Remaining!

Courtesy. Stacey Allaster at the 2020 U.S. Open in New York. The event was played in a bubble and without fans in attendance because of the COVID-19 crisis.

Leadership

In June, Stacey Allaster, a St. Petersburg resident and the U.S. Tennis Association’s chief executive of professional tennis, became the first woman to be named tournament director of the U.S. Open in the prestigious event’s 140-year history.

Allaster, 56, has been a stalwart of the business side of pro tennis for decades, starting with Tennis Canada, when she was vice president of sales and marketing in the early 1990s. In 2006, she was named president of the St. Pete-based Women’s Tennis Association. Three years later she was named CEO.