One of the biggest weaknesses in the college tennis product is a lack of access to information. Finding scores, streams and schedules can feel like pulling teeth. The Intercollegiate Tennis Association and CEO David Mullins are trying to change that.
Making its first major debut for the 2026-27 season, the ITA Live Scoring App powered through MatchTennis! caught attention from fans watching men’s and women’s ITA All Americans. Leading college tennis podcaster, John Parsons, remarked on an episode of No-Ad, No Problem, “The fact that I could just click into a live score it could expand into the video and it had everything I needed right there. Amazing, big fan, loved it.”
The new app allowed for fans to access scores and streams with total ease at Tulsa as the streaming platform, Track Tennis, was seamlessly integrated into the app. You could also access nearly real-time scores and statistics for matches with chair umpires. With roving umpires, matches were updated every other game — still a big improvement compared to the rate of updates seen on normal tournament pages.
The integration was not so seamless for the women’s championship as Cary Tennis Park has its streaming partnership with PlaySight, who is reluctant to provide its streams on the app thus far.
“We’re working through that right now,” Mullins said. “Some of it is bandwidth and time, and it’s facility by facility. They also have their own business models to work through, and capturing people’s data through a sign-in process is something I believe is important to them at this time. Our belief is that they’ll get more exposure by allowing this integration to be more seamless and having more people use it.”
Obtaining a partnership with PlaySight would be a massive step for the goal of furthering the consolidation of streams into one spot, but there are also many other barriers currently in the way.
“We’re at the mercy of non-ITA events,” Mullins said. “For conference matches, conference championships and the NCAA [Championships], we have a certain level of influence, but they can basically do whatever they want.”
With other companies already having their partnerships in place such as the ACC Championships historically using iOnCourt (more on them soon), getting everyone under one branch would be a real challenge. At the same time, most sports don’t have one central spot for broadcasts. College football broadcasts across ABC, Fox, NBC, CBS, The CW, etc. College basketball can be found across various networks as well. But finding live scores, statistics and schedules is easy through various platforms such as ESPN and CBS Sports. That is where college tennis could see the greatest benefit.
“There’s only so much we can influence and control,” Mullins said. “We’re not mandating the use of this. It could get to a point where we mandate it for result submission to the ITA, so that after the match is finished, coaches have to use that app to submit results. It’s not just about promoting their matches through the live scoring links. There are also stats in there that can help players and coaches review their matches and digest that information to apply it to practice.”
We already have a platform for result submission on the ITA’s website, so how much of an upgrade would that really be? Well, MatchTennis! provides a much more navigable interface with team logos.
It also seemed like the ITA prioritized investing in the app over providing a CrackedRacquets broadcast.
“I love the score tracker, that’s an amazing update, but if we’re getting that at the expense of a broadcast, I’d probably take the broadcast,” No-Ad No Problem cohost Adam Drucker said.
Mullins pushed back on the idea that the ITA’s partnership with CrackedRacquets was diminished because of the alternative investments.
“We just signed a new agreement with Cracked Racquets, as our previous agreement expired this summer,” Mullins said. “They will be covering our DI National Indoor Championships again this year, and there’s going to be some improved production there as well, which again costs more money. So we’re always faced with these decisions.”
Another road block facing the ITA is its small budget compared to its big scope of interest.
“We’re a small not-for-profit with a $2.5 million a year budget,” Mullins said. “There’s always a push and pull, and there are always tough decisions about what investments to make and what serves our whole membership. A lot of folks are interested just in the top of Division I college tennis. Our interest is across all seven divisions, so we have to make investments not just for our Division I All-American Championships, National Indoors and things like that. We’re starting a Division II national championship this November. Division II does not have an individual singles and doubles event, so we’ve gone out and created that. That’s more expense on our side. So it’s not as binary as technology investments like live scoring versus CrackedRacquets coverage. These are budgetary decisions across our entire organization.”
Before this year, it seemed like iOnCourt was going to be the app which would become the future of the ITA. But according to Mullins, an agreement never panned out.
“Several years ago, we started working with an individual who was employed by Club Spark, our software provider, and who helped manage our tournament desk and our membership platform,” Mullins said. “He developed this IonCourt live scoring system, kind of in his basement, and we worked closely with him. Our understanding at the time was that Club Spark was going to ingest or buy this piece of software and include it in their tournament desk. So we worked along for many years and got to a good level of adoption.”
“But then the agreement never worked out between the employee and Club Spark. He ended up selling to another group, and now it’s being rebranded as IonSport. So we were left in the middle. We weren’t able to come to an agreement on who owned what in terms of data, and how the two groups had worked together. Most people don’t care. They just want it to work. It’s just not as simple as that.”
“So we had to start from scratch and figure out which live scoring systems we could use for our own events. Should we build our own? What would the cost be? Ultimately we were introduced to MatchTennis!, who had been developing similar tools in their app. They have a big presence in the junior space and the adult league space, and it became pretty apparent to us quite quickly that this was a relationship that was going to work well. We signed the agreement in December of last year, 2025, and made the announcement. Then we spent the whole spring working with Match Tennis on building it out: what features would be required for individual matches and dual matches, and what the officials need on their side. Then we started testing behind the scenes. It was actually used at the SEC Championships last April, and we received a lot of feedback from tournament directors, officials, the SEC coaches, and so on. We were thrilled with the progress.”
“We continued to iterate over the summer. We used it at Summer Nationals, and then we felt it was ready to go at the All-American Championships. Even throughout that week, we learned a lot and kept making improvements. I think it just keeps getting better… We’re thrilled with the progress and excited to see how it continues to advance in the spring.”
At the ITA Regionals, four sites used the new live scoring app — the men’s and women’s Carolina Region, and the men’s and women’s Mountain Region. And tracking their results was much easier.
But one question remains: Can we get everyone to use it?
