Arthur Ashe Stadium does not do quiet.
The world’s biggest tennis court hums, buzzes, shouts and sings from the moment the gates open until the last forehand whistles under the lights. Where Wimbledon’s Centre Court and Roland Garros’s Court Philippe-Chatrier fall into a near-religious hush before play, Ashe offers only a low, restless murmur. Silence is not on the menu in Queens.
“On Arthur Ashe Stadium, there’s always ambient noise,” says Félix Auger-Aliassime, a two-time semifinalist in New York. “The brain just gets used to it after a while. There’s no other way to put it.”
Players arrive with routines, rituals, and carefully rehearsed focus tools. Then they walk into a stadium that sounds more like a Friday night concert than a cathedral of decorum and simply have to cope.
Most of the sport’s elite wouldn’t have it any other way. Frances Tiafoe lights up when he talks about it. “New York—it’s different,” he says. “Night on Ashe is so special. It’s the biggest court in tennis. The atmosphere is wild.” Naomi Osaka, twice a champion here, calls Ashe a “stage,” the kind of place that doesn’t just host stars, but makes them. “The U.S. Open makes stars and there’s just a special type of energy there,” she says.
Tennis, but make it New York
The U.S. Open has stopped apologizing for its volume and started embracing it. American Emma Navarro summed it up last year as “casually rowdy,” a sharp contrast to the “proper,” “elegant,” and “respectful” tone of Wimbledon. That’s exactly the shift organizers want.
For 2024, the tournament rolled out a “fan free movement” policy, relaxing long-standing rules on when spectators can move to and from their seats. In a sport that traditionally freezes fans in place until changeovers, it’s a bold step. “It might be seen as a radical thing for tennis,” tournament referee Jake Garner said at the time, “but I’m not sure trying to increase the fan experience and making it more enjoyable for them should be that radical.”
The Open is loudly rewriting tennis etiquette. This is a sport built on quiet—quiet crowds, quiet players, quiet everything except the occasional grunt and the thwack of ball on strings. That silence traces back to its roots in the British upper classes of the late 19th century, with all the social codes that came with them.
“There has been a tradition of allowing players to concentrate,” says Lizzie Post, great-great-granddaughter of etiquette icon Emily Post and co-host of the Awesome Etiquette podcast. Historian Robert Lake notes that traditional tennis etiquette “is definitely rooted in ideas of class that permeated the sport when it first emerged in the late 1800s.” The sport inherited not just rules, but a worldview: restraint, decorum, and a strict sense of how spectators should behave.
Yet the modern game is discovering that quiet is a choice, not a requirement.
“Tennis causes problems for itself when it is clutching its pearls and being precious,” says veteran journalist Matthew Futterman, who covers the sport for The Athletic. He points to the impossible sell of telling a child to sit still and stay silent for hours. “How in the world are you supposed to get a kid excited about going to a tennis match—and being quiet—when you bring an eight-year-old into a stadium and you say, sit still and be quiet for the next three hours? That sounds like a punishment to me.”
A festival with a drawsheet
Part of what makes the U.S. Open different is the way fans consume it. A football or basketball game has a clear beginning and end; you sit down, you watch, you go home. A day at Flushing Meadows is something else entirely.
“Tennis, you’re sort of wandering around, you’re in your seat for a while, you watch the match, but a lot of it is about everything else,” Futterman says. In the early rounds, a fan can catch more than a dozen matches in a single day, drifting from outside courts to show courts, from practice sessions to food stalls.
“The brilliance of the U.S. Open,” Futterman adds, is that it understood that reality. The event works best when it feels like “there’s an outdoor festival party going on with music and great food and all those things—and there happens to also be some tennis which you want to enjoy as well.”
The USTA leans into that identity. “Everything that people associate with New York—the passion and the energy and the excitement—feels very much endemic to the U.S. Open itself,” says Nicole Kankam, the USTA’s Managing Director, Pro Tennis Marketing and Entertainment. “It’s loud, it’s tough, it’s hot, but it’s also everything that makes it great and exciting.”
That New York blend—grit, glamour, and a little chaos—has turned the Open into a crossroads of sport and culture. Simone Scott, a journalist who runs “The Girls’ Guide to Sports” series on social media, sees the event as a rare intersection of competition, style, and community. “I love how the U.S. Open brings together so many different worlds. It’s very New York,” says Scott, who is working with Dove during this year’s tournament. “You have incredible athletes competing at the highest level, but you also have fashion, culture, entertainment, and fans from every background all coming together in one place. It feels vibrant, welcoming, and inspiring, and there's really nothing else quite like it.”
Growing the game, raising the volume
Behind the noise is a clear strategy. The USTA wants more people in the tent.
“Audiences and fan expectations change and evolve,” Kankam says. “We can maintain some traditions that are at our core, but if we’re not open to evolution and meeting fans where they are, then you miss out on growing your audience.”
One of the clearest examples is the Finals Fan Fest, launched last year and expanding this season. It allows people without tickets to the finals to buy grounds passes, watch the matches from parties on site, and soak in the atmosphere. The numbers are striking: 85% of people who bought those passes were new to the U.S. Open, and 95% of after-party ticket buyers were new to the tournament’s audience.
That’s not just noise. That’s a pipeline.
Jessica Schiffer, founder of the tennis platform Hard Court, believes the shift is overdue. “Tennis has been very stuffy and uptight for too long, and we need to get with the times and make it a little easier for people to enjoy the sport,” she says. At the same time, she admits a split loyalty: “I’m also a purist at heart and I love the peace and quiet that many tennis matches come with.”
That tension sits at the heart of the Open’s transformation. How do you welcome the festival crowd without losing the essence of the sport?
When the party blocks the view
Not everyone in Queens last year came away enchanted. For some, the problem wasn’t decibels. It was distraction.
Brand strategist Heather Queiroz attended with her family and found herself less irritated by the roar than by the constant movement. “We found ourselves in a lot of weird interactions and arguments with other people because they would just be standing [during points] or just standing in the aisles and then you can’t see,” she says. “What makes tennis so unique is that it’s a very precise sport. If you were going to watch the match, you kind of need to watch it.”
Her concern isn’t about the Open being fun. It’s about whether the experience still works for people who show up to actually follow the tennis. She worries the event is skewing toward casual visitors at the expense of long-time devotees. “Short-term, you can erode your loyal fan base, but long-term it doesn’t play out,” she says. “The more OG fans are definitely frustrated—and then with the prices going up, it makes you not really want to go because if you end up not really being able to see the match very well, then you might as well just watch it on TV and at least be able to see good tennis.”
Her suggestion is simple: teach people the basics. She’d like to see signage across the grounds explaining tennis etiquette to newcomers. Lizzie Post agrees, arguing that tickets themselves could come with a brief guide. “You do want to make sure spectators know what the experience is supposed to be and what the decorum is for it,” Post says. That responsibility, she adds, falls squarely on organizers and ushers. “It’s a lot on the establishments that host these events to determine the type of event they’re going to be throwing and make the atmosphere known.”
For Post, etiquette isn’t about snobbery; it’s about awareness. It means “thinking about our impact on the people around us and how we can make that a positive one and not a negative one. It doesn’t take much.” At the center of all the noise, she reminds, are two athletes whose lives revolve around these moments. “It is two competitors playing at their best and trying to be their best. They train all year, every day. Their whole life, their livelihood, is based on this. You don’t want to be the lone voice that’s really loud in a quieter place.”
The new normal
Arthur Ashe Stadium will never sound like Wimbledon. It’s not trying to. The U.S. Open has chosen a different path: a tournament that feels like New York itself, with all the friction that implies.
The old codes of tennis still exist, on grass and clay and in quieter corners of the tour. In Queens, they’re being rewritten in real time, point by point, chant by chant, as a new generation decides what watching this sport should feel like.
As Futterman puts it, “It’s not your British grandmother’s tennis tournament.” The only real question now is how loud the future of tennis is willing to be.
