Prepared for prospective Raleigh owners · Team Rise · September 2026
“This one you can have fun.”
A kid in the stands in Atlanta, explaining the product better than our deck does. He came to watch his sister play. The Triangle knows this feeling already — it just knows it in March, on a college campus, and only until May.
INTENNSE Arena, Atlanta · 2026 season · Nine sections, about six minutes
In the stands, Atlanta · Season 2
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 blue diamond is the league’s own MVP race, on its own scale.
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 ↗■ The market
Championship team tennis lives here. Professional team tennis never has.
Cary Tennis Park has hosted the ACC Championships for most of the past two decades and is committed through 2029. It took the ITA Women’s All-American Championships away from the Riviera Club in California and has held it five years running. More than three thousand people buy tickets to watch college team tennis there. In the summer the same park stages an ATP Challenger. This market has professional tennis, and it has championship team tennis — it has never had the two in the same thing.
What the Triangle has built
The elite programmes here are the women’s. In the final 2026 rankings North Carolina were No. 5 in the country, NC State No. 8 and Duke No. 15 — three top-fifteen programmes inside twenty-five miles. In 2023 the NCAA final was North Carolina against NC State, a national championship decided between two Triangle campuses. Last season both national individual titles came out of this market: North Carolina’s Reese Brantmeier won the singles, NC State’s Gabbi Broadfoot and Tori Osuigwe the doubles. North Carolina have reached sixteen consecutive NCAA super regionals.
Cary Tennis Park runs 32 championship courts on 24 acres, draws more than 300,000 visitors a year and stages over twenty sanctioned tournaments. Its ACC crowds are the largest in the event’s history there, and 2026 set the record again.
All of it stops in May, and none of it is professional. That is the gap.
■ The name
Rise was named for this state before it had a home in it.
First in Flight. Kill Devil Hills, 1903 — the thing North Carolina puts on its own licence plates. That is where the name came from. Rise has played out of Atlanta so far, like every team in the league; in 2028 every team moves to a home market of its own. This is the one it was named for, and the charter for it is still open.
■ The roster
Rise’s best player last season came out of Chapel Hill.
Carson Tanguilig was the No. 7 singles player and the No. 1 doubles player in college tennis at North Carolina. Team Rise took her in the first round of the 2026 draft. In her first professional season she finished fourth in the league’s MVP race — ahead of players with tour ranking histories a decade longer than hers.
Who else came through here
Four players on 2026 rosters came out of Triangle programmes: Carson Tanguilig from North Carolina, Adriana Reami from NC State, and two from North Carolina Central. None of them had to leave the country, or sit out a year, to turn professional.
Diana Shnaider played a single season at NC State, in 2023, and played in that all-Triangle national final. She is now inside the world’s top twenty, with an Olympic silver medal. The players this market watches in the spring do not stay amateurs for long — they just have nowhere professional to be in the summer.
And the elite programmes here are the women’s. Ours is a league where the women’s result counts exactly as much as the men’s, because there is only one result: three women and three men, one score.
■ The window
Nineteen days after the college season ends, ours begins.
Both NCAA Division I team championships finished on 17 May 2026. INTENNSE opened on 5 June and played eight weeks, finishing before the US Open swing peaks. The college game hands its audience over, and nothing else is competing for it: the NBA and the NHL have finished, and the NFL has not started.
The calendar is the first thing in the bar at the top of this page, with the college season and the American sports year as separate views.
■ The city
A market that turns up when the thing is worth turning up for.
The Hurricanes have sold out 168 consecutive regular-season and playoff home games since February 2023, and won the Stanley Cup in 2026. The Courage have been winning trophies two miles from Cary Tennis Park since 2017. This market supports what it believes in — and outside the NHL, it has no team in any of the four major North American leagues.
The rest of the picture
Research Triangle Park describes itself as a community of more than 385 companies and over 55,000 employees. Wake County’s largest employers include IBM, Fidelity, Lenovo, Cisco, SAS, Pfizer and Epic Games, alongside Duke, NC State and North Carolina.
North Carolina is also becoming a centre of gravity for the professional game: the WTA announced in September 2026 that it will move its global headquarters to Charlotte and take the WTA Finals there from 2027. That is two and a half hours away, and it is not a Raleigh asset — but it says something about where the sport is placing its bets.
■ What Season 2 did in Atlanta
A season that already sells.
Ten teams, eight weeks, fifty-one matches. Season 2 closed on 1 August with Freeze beating Outriders 137–130 in front of a full house.
The local business
By midseason, attendance was more than four times the year before and had already passed the whole of 2025. Thirteen sponsors signed, twelve of them through relationships already in the city, with Atlanta-based Cellairis as Founding Partner. The average ticket sold for $52, and team merchandise outsold league merchandise.
Eleven community events drew 770 people off the couch and onto a court. Those are the numbers a local owner inherits and builds on.
The Rules of INTENNSE, explained · 2:04
Nearly 8,000 fans through a 500-seat arena.
Average across forty airings on Peachtree; the best single Arc drew 116,000.
Record live concurrents across the final series.
Two broadcast, two RSNs, seven FAST, three streaming — 60% of watch time on TV.
■ Someone inside the game said so first
USTA Atlanta’s executive director coached a roster in Season 2, then wrote about it.
“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
What else she said
She coached eight INTENNSE athletes through the 2026 season with the Outriders, and wrote about it on her own feed on Championship Weekend. We didn’t commission it and we didn’t pay for it.
On the people behind it: “I also continue to be amazed at the talented staff that Intennse has put together… It is a remarkable team that believes in the product and have fun while doing what they love.”
And she closed with: “I truly believe we’re only seeing the beginning of INTENNSE.”
■ What an owner holds
A ten-year charter for the Raleigh territory.
Owners hold an exclusive Team Charter: MLS-style, geographically bound economic rights, not a traditional franchise. Ten years, renewing in five-year terms.
The league keeps
- Game
- Format, rules, schedule, officiating
- Brand
- League marks and national sponsorship
- Rights
- Media and data rights
The owner holds
- Team
- Operations and team marks in the territory
- Revenue
- Local sponsorship, ticketing, hospitality, activations
- Share
- Team merchandise, and a share of pooled league revenue
2026–27
The league operates the team and secures venues while the owner learns the business from inside it.
2028
Operations transfer. The owner appoints a GM, takes ticketing, hospitality and venue, and inherits a community playbook proven over three years in Atlanta.
2029 on
Scale — and a share of the fees from every charter the league sells after the initial offering.
How the economics are built
The owner keeps the large majority of the revenue the team earns locally. Separately, a share of league revenue is pooled and distributed across the teams, so an owner participates in the league’s growth as well as the team’s. From 2029, owners also share in expansion fees as the league adds cities: ten teams in 2027, a home market for every team by 2028, and a market we believe will carry thirty or more teams by 2035.
We’ll be straightforward about what kind of investment this is. It is a franchise-value investment first, and the operating model takes several seasons to turn cash-positive. We’ll walk you through that model, line by line, in the room rather than on a page.
■ What early looks like
The first owners in a league buy the cheapest seats it will ever sell.
That is the pattern in every emerging league that lasted. The Triangle has watched it happen next door.
What we are not claiming
Not every new league lasts, and nothing about the ones that did is a promise about this one. In Major League Pickleball, teams that changed hands for around $100,000 in 2021 were valued near $10 million two years later; other ventures of the same era are gone.
The argument is only this. If team tennis becomes a real league in America, the charters sold before 2029 will have been the cheap ones. We think Season 2 is the evidence that it will.
■ Who you would be building with
The people behind the league.
■ Pulse Partners, by team
A Pulse Partner is an ambassador, not an owner. Rise already has one; the charter is separate, and it is open.
■ Why we sent this
We’re looking for Raleigh’s owners.
What we cannot show you yet: we have never played an Arc in this market. Rise has no home club here, no local staff and no Raleigh season behind it. Everything on this page is either the league’s record in Atlanta, the Triangle’s own record, or the roster we already have. The rest would be built with you.
A local group for Rise: people who already know this market’s tennis, and want the team that stays in it.
Where an hour could lead
We’ll bring the charter, the model and the transition plan, and answer every question about them. If it’s worth a second hour, we’d rather it were at Windy Hill with Marcelo than in a conference room.
The charter
Terms, territory and the path from league-operated to owner-operated, walked through in full.
The model
Revenue lines, breakeven and the years to cash-positive — the numbers we left off this page on purpose.
The team
An afternoon at the home club, with the coach and the players, before Season 3.
