Washington’s Citi Open is merging with the San Jose-based Mubadala Silicon Valley Classic in a move that will elevate the women’s tournament in D.C. from a WTA 250 to a 500-level event, tournament chairman Mark Ein and IMG announced Thursday.
The merger is subject to ATP Board approval. If accepted, its impact will be twofold: In raising a level, Washington’s hard-court classic should attract a greater quantity of higher-ranked players to a women’s event that will for the first time since its inception more than a decade ago be on par with the men’s event in the tennis tours’ three-tiered tournament ladder. WTA 500 tournaments award more prize money and rankings points than 250-level tournaments.
It also will shake up the WTA’s travel pattern in transplanting a tournament that has been held in California’s Bay Area since 1971 to Washington, where participating players will be in much closer proximity to other major WTA events held in August and September, including the U.S. Open.
The tournament, to be called the Mubadala Citi DC Open, will be the only combined ATP-WTA 500 tournament on the tour schedule. It will take place from July 29 to Aug. 6 at Rock Creek Park Tennis Center.
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“The D.C. community loves tennis in general, and we’ve sold out every session for the last two years,” Ein said in a phone interview. “So fans here have really embraced the tournament for a long time but particularly given all the upgrades and investment in fan experience we’ve made in recent years. A big part of that is our ability to showcase men and women at the same event, which is one of the things that makes tennis so unique.”
A staple of the region’s late-summer sports calendar for more than 50 years, the tournament first incorporated a women’s event in 2012 when title sponsor Citigroup came aboard.
But the women’s tournament has always existed one rung below the men’s in terms of how the ATP and WTA tours designate their events, which created logistical issues. In recent years, organizers tried to schedule an equal or close to equal number of men’s and women’s matches on prime courts despite the unequal status of the events and quality of the playing fields.
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For women’s players, the choice when scheduling their first week in August was often between earning fewer ranking points and less money in Washington — a more logical stopover where they could acclimate to the East Coast’s climate and time zone before traveling to the following Masters 1000 event in Canada that precedes the U.S. Open in New York — or flying across the country to earn more rankings points and play for a bigger purse in San Jose.
Yet despite its lower designation, those who played in Washington did so in front of passionate crowds who relished the opportunity to cheer on rising stars and tour veterans alike.
The tournament in Washington is gaining a sense of history in addition to elevated status — the Silicon Valley Classic was founded 52 years ago by Billie Jean King as the first event of the 1971 professional women’s tour that became the WTA. It moved to the campus at San José State University from Stanford in 2018 and is owned and operated by IMG.
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“We’d like to thank the Bay area for over 50 years of support, enthusiasm and passion. We’ve loved bringing the best in women’s tennis to your doorstep year after year,” Josh Ripple, senior vice president of tennis events at IMG, said in a statement. “While we’re sad to go, we are also very excited about this new chapter in the event’s history as the only 500-level combined event on the tours in the U.S. We hope that by bringing this event to D.C. we can start new traditions and bring that same passion for women’s tennis we saw in San Jose to the capital.”
The Citi Open was co-founded in 1969 by Donald Dell, John Harris and Arthur Ashe. It benefits the Washington Tennis & Education Foundation, which provides tennis education and educational support to youth in underserved areas of the city.
Full-tournament tickets are already on sale while individual seats will be available closer to the start of the event.
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