U.S. Open: Meet the Long Islander who oversees the fan experience in Flushing

On a day of quarterfinal singles matches at this year’s U.S. Open, as the first of some 40,000 fans streamed into the National Tennis Center, a Long Island man surveyed his domain and saw that it was good.

“It’s working,” said Chris Studley, of Massapequa, managing director of event services for the United States Tennis Association. He scanned the main gate and then, via a CCTV feed on his phone, the great boardwalk that conveys fans from parking and mass transit to David Dinkins Circle and the metal detectors through which fans pass before entering the tennis center. There were lines to get in, but they were short. “I see long lines and I get scared,” he said.

Studley oversees more than 3,600 mostly seasonal employees who run the tournament’s restaurants, check your tickets and raise the chains during play on the outer courts. He oversees the fleet of 200 vans and Cadillac sport utility vehicles that carry the players from their Manhattan hotels to the Queens courts. He helps place all those Evian stands that dot the 46.5-acre tennis center grounds. The first one fans encounter should be close enough to the gate to provide relief on a hot day but not so close it impedes crowd flow, he said.

“His job is everything that is public-facing here at the tennis center,” said Daniel Zausner, the tennis center’s chief operating officer. “That’s everything that the public and the players and our partners will touch and feel… from the second you park your car or come off the train.”

To shorten Open lines, food and beverage purchases are cashless and some of the roughly 2,000 food and beverage items for sale on the grounds are prepped before sale.

When long lines do form, it is Studley’s job to think about where people will stand and how they will feel doing so.

Studley gave, as an example, a late day five-setter in Louis Armstrong Stadium. Inevitably, fans from Ashe will migrate to the action, generating lines at the Armstrong entrance. “We want to give them a space to go, so we queue them up by the player banners,” Studley said. The key is to “keep people moving, give them something to look at.”

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Studley, 41, has worked at USTA since 2009. He worked at Massapequa’s All American Hamburger Drive In in high school, then majored in marketing at Hofstra University. Later, working at Momentum Worldwide, a marketing company, he helped bring American Express Radio to the U.S. Open. The USTA job followed.

During the Open, Studley’s workday starts at 9 a.m. and lasts until whenever the last point of the night session is played. Sometimes that means 2 a.m. or later. He doesn’t bother to commute from the Island, living at a hotel near LaGuardia Airport from mid-August through the first week in September, when the tournament ends.

His schedule during the offseason is saner, though in recent years it has gotten busier as the USTA seeks non-tennis uses for its two giant tennis stadiums including professional wrestling, college graduations and the Westminster Dog Show, though that event has returned to Madison Square Garden.

When he was new to the job, he said, the tournament did what he called a “smooth open,” with the first week of qualifying matches free to the public but many services and events delayed until main draw play began. A few restaurants opened in the food village; many didn’t. There is no more smooth open: Fan Week, as it is now known, drew 216,000 visitors this year, and featured not just tennis but a concert by country star Dierks Bentley.

“We opened everything, every day,” Studley said.

Staff evaluations and planning for next year’s Open start almost as soon as the tournament ends. Studley said he was looking forward to a vacation — maybe in December.