The U.S. Open concluded yesterday, with Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz winning the men’s singles tournament and pocketing $5 million in prize money. Pickleball may be the media rage, but tennis’ four grand slam tournaments (Melbourne, Paris, London, New York) still occupy eight weeks of global television and attract millions of fans for annual two-week events. What’s little understood is that these major tournaments are supported by hundreds of smaller tournaments throughout the year that also supercharge tourism and bring long-duration spectator events spread out over one to two weeks.

In the U.S., they include the Indian Wells and Miami Opens in March, and the Cincinnati Open in August, which attract many of the same players who participate in the grand slams. Dallas; Washington, D.C.; Delray Beach, Florida; Houston; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, host signature annual tourneys as well, bunched in late winter and the run-up to the U.S. Open. Subsidiary tournaments—so-called “challengers”—take place throughout the U.S.

The Twin Cities is thought of as a strong tennis market but has no signature event.

To generalize, there are two types of tennis tournament. Those sponsored by the major national and international tennis organizations typically require large, fixed campuses of courts and facilities. The Baseline Tennis Center at the U of M is the state’s largest tennis campus, with 12 outdoor courts and 10 indoors. The other type are exhibition events that require only one or two courts and rotate around the world. Davis Cup qualifying tournaments and the Laver Cup are examples.

Matt Meunier, deputy executive director for Minnesota Sports & Events, says the organization hopes to compete to host the Laver Cup, a three-day indoor arena exhibition tournament each September that rotates between Europe and the U.S., featuring the top names in global tennis. This year’s event is in San Francisco next week. Laver requires only an NBA/NHL-scale arena available over a weekend after the U.S. Open.

Meunier says events like Laver are theoretically attractable because they come with their own sponsors and prize pool. He says organizers typically look to ensure that a city can sell the event out. Other U.S. sites for Laver have included Boston and Chicago.

For the Twin Cities to alternately become home to a major or minor sanctioned tournament is a heavier lift. The number of large-scale U.S. tennis tournaments has declined over the years, and the periods when global players are in the U.S.—late winter and after Wimbledon through the U.S. Open—are packed with established tournaments. The Cincinnati Open attracted nearly 300,000 fans this August and has a history dating to 1899. The region is investing a quarter billion dollars in improvements to its campus in suburban Mason, which has five stadium courts and 31 courts total.

“Tournaments are challenging because you have to raise a prize pool and generate ticket revenue from scratch,” Meunier notes. And you need a facility of a scale to host it and attract sufficient visitors. It’s not clear that the Twin Cities has that.

Tennis fans inspired by the U.S. Open probably can’t expect the region to find a major place in the global tennis calendar anytime soon, but there is work to be done that could deliver a more frequent presence.