Préparé pour Tennis Canada · Prepared for Tennis Canada · September 2026
A home team to rally behind.
What turns a new player into a player for life is something to belong to: a team, a season, a result that matters next week. Montreal already has the team. Freeze are the 2026 champions of INTENNSE, a professional league where men and women play for one score. This page is about how the format could run through Canadian tennis, from a club night to a national partnership, at whatever depth Tennis Canada chooses.
Une équipe d’ici à encourager · Nine sections, about seven minutes
A gender-balanced Professional Team Tennis League
Eight playing weeks in the middle of the summer. Switch the view to see the same season against the American sports year, or against the college calendar our players come from.
Where our players have been on the tour, and where they sit on the rating that covers everyone. The orange rule is where tennis starts paying for itself.
UTR: our players against the tour’s
Down to the wire; Sudden Death
Two Arcs that finished a point apart. Each clip picks up in the closing minutes, with the full Arc a click away.
Sudden death, level at 142
The final three minutes of Freeze v Rise, 20 June. The clock runs out with the teams tied, and the next point decides it: 143–142.
Match Center ↗One point, one minute left
The final minute of Outriders v Inferno, 25 June. It finishes 150–149, with the winner’s cheque on court.
Match Center ↗Two points that flipped the score
One from the net, one from the low camera. Each is about twenty seconds, and each one changed the scoreboard.
Low angle, the final Bolt
The last play of the Bolt from the low camera: a two-pointer that takes the Sting from 86–87 to 88–87. 22 seconds.
Match Center ↗Mixed doubles, last seconds
Dalayna Hewitt’s two-pointer in the closing seconds against Rise, 15 July — 156 to 158, level. 18 seconds.
Match Center ↗■ Vos chiffres · Your numbers
A million more players since 2023. The question is where they play next.
More than six million Canadians played tennis in 2025, over a million more than in 2023. Nearly 37% of 12-to-17-year-olds played. Tennis is now tied with golf as the third most-played sport in the country.
“Turning this momentum into sustained participation remains core to our mission.”
Gavin Ziv · Tennis Canada participation study · 13 May 2026
■ Le produit · The product
The Rules of INTENNSE, explained · 2:04
One team, both halves of the game, one score.
An INTENNSE match is an Arc: about an hour and forty minutes, on a clock, with singles and doubles counting toward a single team score. Every roster is men and women together. The women’s results decide the tie exactly as much as the men’s, and every player on the roster is paid the same.
Female participation in Canada has grown from 29% to 46%, by Tennis Canada’s count. In this format, the balance between women and men is the scoring system.
How players are paid
Equal pay is built into the league: a woman and a man on the same roster are paid the same. Every player receives a guaranteed base for the season, before a single match is won, with coaching, training and player support provided. Prize money comes on top.
For players ranked outside the top hundred, that is a professional season that pays whether or not they win a draw.
Average across forty airings on Peachtree TV; the best single Arc drew 116,000.
Two broadcast, two regional sports networks, seven FAST channels, three streaming — 60% of watch time on TV.
Across the final series, 1 August 2026.
Forty-three of them professional, across eight weeks in June and July.
■ L’équipe de Montréal · Montreal’s team
The champions are already Montreal’s.
Freeze won the 2026 INTENNSE championship on 1 August, 137–130 over the Outriders, decided inside the final ten-minute period. The trophy they lifted carries the Bata name. Freeze is Montreal’s team.
The next morning, the National Bank Open began at IGA Stadium. The league’s summer ends where your flagship starts.
Montreal has already played in it. Raphaëlle Lacasse, born in Montreal, played the 2026 season for Fortune — a year after winning the doubles title at your National Bank Challenger in Saguenay.
Who carries it
Martin Brodeur, born in Montreal and twice an Olympic champion for Canada, is Freeze’s Pulse Partner. Thomas Bata, INTENNSE’s Chairman, lives in Montreal and is part of the Freeze ownership group.
■ Une équipe à encourager · A home team
You have already said it.
“…we expect several Canadian players to take part, meaning they will have a home team to rally behind.”
Gavin Ziv, welcoming World Team Tennis to Toronto · 22 July 2026
Two nights in December give Canada a home team to cheer. A season gives it one to follow. Now picture one in every Canadian city.
A team in every city, and a path to it.
Canada already knows how this works, because it built the model in hockey: minor hockey in every town, junior teams that belong to their cities, and a path from both to the professional game. A junior team is where a city watches its next generation, and where a kid first sees the route from the local rink to the top. Tennis has never had that shape. INTENNSE could give it one.
Junior and club teams
Clubs field INTENNSE teams, boys and girls on the same roster, playing their neighbours on the same rules as the professionals.
A team for every city
Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, Québec City, Halifax — each with its own team, drawing on its clubs, universities and academies.
A national competition
Canadian cities play each other in a season of their own, within Canada, ending in a national championship.
The professional league
The best move up: into the draft, onto professional rosters, and home again to Freeze and the Canadian teams that follow.
Freeze’s Pulse Partner, Martin Brodeur, came up through Québec junior hockey on his way to the NHL. This is a picture of where the format could go, not a plan with dates: every step would be designed with Tennis Canada and the provincial associations.
■ Sur le campus · On campus
Universities are already playing it.
On 25 September, Georgia Tech hosted and promoted a scrimmage on INTENNSE rules, with our staff there to help run it — the second time the university has played the format. More campuses are on the calendar this fall.
A university team is the step between a club junior and a professional roster. On INTENNSE rules, a university’s women and men can take the court as one side, for one score.
Canada’s university game
U SPORTS made tennis its first pilot sport, in partnership with Tennis Canada. Four regions — the Atlantic league, the Tennis Québec university league, the OUA in Ontario, and the West’s BC and Prairie divisions — send their champions to the Canadian University Championships.
This year those championships were played at IGA Stadium, from 28 to 31 May. Université Laval kept the women’s title and UBC won the men’s. The competition, the venue and the rivalries are already there; an INTENNSE night between two of those champions would put them on one scoreboard.
■ Du club au pays · From club to country
The ripple effect, level by level.
“We’re always thinking about the ripple effect. This tournament is our flagship, but its impact reaches into communities, clubs, and classrooms across the country.”
Gavin Ziv · Toronto Region Board of Trade · 3 July 2025
INTENNSE is built to work at every level of that ripple. The same format, the same scoring and the same team identity run from a single club night to a professional season, so a junior in Laval and a Freeze player in the final are playing the same game.
A club runs an INTENNSE season
One club, one community. Its own members, on its own courts, in teams affiliated to a professional crest — with the playbook, coach resources, registration, player profiles and statistics supplied.
Already yours: interclub play and Community Tennis Leagues.
An association connects its clubs
A provincial association, an academy group or a school league runs one coordinated framework across its locations, within clubs and between them.
Already yours: Tennis Québec’s team events and the high-school league whose final is played at IGA Stadium.
Montreal builds around its team
Clubs, schools, universities and municipalities joined into one city competition around Freeze, with a seasonal festival, championships, visits from the professional roster and coach development.
Already yours: the community courts planned for the rebuilt IGA site.
A national INTENNSE layer
Tennis Canada adopts the format as a participation and competition layer across the country, with national championships, an all-star festival and a nationwide platform for partners.
Already yours: Granby, the only mixed Challenger in the country.
A stake in what it becomes
Professional INTENNSE play hosted in Canada, destination festivals, and a seat at the table as the league grows. For a partner who wants to go this far, that can include a share in the growth itself.
An open door, not a proposal. It is a conversation to have in person.
Each level stands on its own, and none requires the one above it. A club can start this winter; a national partnership can take a season to design.
■ Premiers pas · Easy on-ramps
Six ways to start without committing to all of it.
■ Déjà approuvé · A federation that has seen it
From inside a USTA section.
“Innovative, fast-paced, co-ed team format challenged our players in new ways while creating an electric atmosphere that brought a fresh energy to the game.”
Amy Bartlett O’Connell · Executive Director, USTA Atlanta · 31 July 2026
She coached eight INTENNSE athletes with the Outriders during Season 2, and saw the format from the bench as well as the stands. On Championship Weekend she wrote about it on her own feed, describing a league committed to making tennis “more engaging, more accessible, and more fan-focused… and FUN!”
We didn’t commission that, and we didn’t pay for it. A federation leader ran a roster in the format for a full season and recommended it on the record, closing with: “I truly believe we’re only seeing the beginning of INTENNSE.”
■ Pourquoi cette page · Why we sent this
To give the momentum somewhere to go.
We would like Canada to be the first country where INTENNSE runs from a club night to a professional final — and we would like Tennis Canada to shape how.
Where a working session could lead
A few hours with your sport and events teams, with the playbook, the platform and the season calendar on the table, to choose a first step and a date.
A first night
Which club, which week, and which Freeze players.
A pilot
One league or school competition, one season, measured against the participation numbers you already track.
The longer conversation
What a national partnership could look like, and how far Tennis Canada would want to go.
Thomas Bata, Chairman · Charles Allen, Chief Executive Officer
