Arthur Ashe Stadium: A New Era of Noise at the U.S. Open

Arthur Ashe Stadium never really settles. It hums, it buzzes, it chatters. Even in the moments when a traditional tennis crowd would draw breath and fall silent, New York’s biggest stage refuses to play along.

Opened in 1997, the U.S. Open’s marquee arena is the largest tennis-specific stadium on the planet, and it behaves like it. Wimbledon’s Centre Court and Roland Garros’s Court Philippe-Chatrier still cling to the old code: hush before the serve, murmurs only between points. On Ashe, the most a player can hope for is a low, restless drone.

“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. There’s no preparation for that. All the players, they step on the court, they try to play their game, they try to focus with their tools and with their preparation. But everybody’s got their way of going about it.”

Top players, by and large, don’t complain. They lean into it.

“New York—it’s different,” says Frances Tiafoe. “Night on Ashe is so special. It’s the biggest court in tennis. The atmosphere is wild.” Naomi Osaka, a two-time U.S. Open champion, calls Ashe a “stage.” “The U.S. Open makes stars,” she says, “and there’s just a special type of energy there.”

A Grand Slam That Sounds Like the City

The U.S. Open has stopped apologizing for the noise and started branding it. American player Emma Navarro called the tournament “casually rowdy” last year, a pointed contrast to Wimbledon’s “proper,” “elegant,” and “respectful” tone.

Tournament organizers have pushed that shift. In 2024, the Open relaxed long-standing rules on when spectators could move to and from their seats, rolling out a “fan free movement” policy. The message was clear: this is your night out as much as it is their match.

“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.”

In a sport built on silence, the U.S. Open is loudly rewriting the etiquette manual.

Traditionally, tennis demanded quiet. Spectators were expected to sit still and say little. Players, outside of the occasional grunt, complied. “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.

That tradition isn’t just about manners. Tennis emerged as a pastime of the British aristocracy in the late 19th century and carried over the social codes of its original players—decorum, restraint, a certain stiffness. “You can’t separate the sport from the people who played it,” says historian Robert Lake, who has written on the subject. He notes that traditional tennis etiquette “is definitely rooted in ideas of class that permeated the sport when it first emerged in the late 1800s.”

But quiet, as it turns out, 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 of The Athletic. “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 Tournament That Feels Like a Festival

Tennis doesn’t unfold like football, basketball, or soccer. There is no single kickoff, no neatly packaged two-hour window. A day at a major is a sprawl: multiple matches, multiple courts, constant movement.

“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, dipping in and out of contests, practice courts, food stalls, and sponsor activations.

“The brilliance of the U.S. Open,” he adds, is that the tournament realized “tennis is at its 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 has embraced that idea. Nicole Kankam, the organization’s Managing Director of Pro Tennis Marketing and Entertainment, sees a direct line between New York City and the Open’s 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,” she says. “It’s loud, it’s tough, it’s hot, but it’s also everything that makes it great and exciting.”

Simone Scott, a journalist known for “The Girls’ Guide to Sports,” a series that builds an online sports community for women and encourages them to “show up as themselves in every space they enter,” sees the U.S. Open as something more than a tennis event.

She describes it as a rare intersection of sport, style, and culture. That blend, she says, opens the gates for people who might not call themselves tennis fans at all. “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.”

For the USTA, that accessibility isn’t a side project; it’s the mission. “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.”

New Fans, New Spaces, New Tensions

The Open has started to test what that evolution looks like in practice. One of the clearest examples: the expansion of its Finals Fan Fest, launched last year. The initiative allows people without tickets to the championship matches to buy grounds passes and watch from parties on site.

The numbers caught the USTA’s attention. According to Kankam, 85% of people who bought Finals Fan Fest grounds passes were new to the U.S. Open, and 95% of after-party ticket buyers were also net new to their audience.

Those figures delight marketers and worry some long-time attendees.

“The changing U.S. Open atmosphere is good for the sport,” says Jessica Schiffer, founder of Hard Court. “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. That being said, I’m also a purist at heart and I love the peace and quiet that many tennis matches come with.”

That distinction—open the doors, but don’t knock down the walls—sits at the heart of the debate. Many critics of the new vibe aren’t asking for Wimbledon-level silence. Their frustration is less about decibels and more about distraction: the constant motion, the people standing in aisles mid-point, the sense that the match has become background noise to the party.

Brand strategist Heather Queiroz attended last year’s Open with her family. The sound didn’t bother her. The movement did.

“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 runs deeper than a single night out. She worries that the Open is bending too far toward people who aren’t there for the tennis.

“Short-term, you can erode your loyal fan base, but long-term it doesn’t play out,” Queiroz 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 proposed fix is simple: education. Clear signage around the grounds. A primer on when to move, when to sit, when to cheer. Lizzie Post agrees that guidance should start before fans even find their seats.

“Maybe tickets should come with a brief guide on expected behavior,” she says. “You do want to make sure spectators know what the experience is supposed to be and what the decorum is for it. That’s in the hands of the people issuing the tickets and the ushers who are meant to help crowd control. 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 impact. “Etiquette,” she says, is “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 this, she reminds, is still the match itself. “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,” Post says.

The U.S. Open has decided that its quieter places will be fewer and farther between. The sport’s old guard may wince; the new crowd may cheer louder. But as the music blares, the cocktails clink, and the ball toss goes up into that New York night, one thing is clear, as Futterman puts it:

“It’s not your British grandmother’s tennis tournament.”