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Martin Blackman completed his first full calendar year as USTA General Manager of Player Development in December, undoubtedly relieved that his department's transition to the USTA's National Campus was in its final stages.

Earlier this month I visited the recently opened Lake Nona facility outside Orlando, and arranged to interview Blackman at Player Development's adidas Performance Center. While the conversation naturally focused on the transition from Player Development's former location in Boca Raton and the benefits of the new 64-acre complex, we also discussed the department's commitment to college tennis, his accomplishments and mistakes, the philosophy behind recent junior competition changes and his goals for 2017.

Questions and Answers

Colette Lewis (CL): Have you settled in to your new headquarters now?

Martin Blackman (MB): I finally feel like we're in a rhythm. Up until two months ago, everything that we've done has been in the context of the transition. Even though we're doing what we're doing, working with players going to tournaments, we're doing camps - at the same time, in the background, the transition was always taking bandwidth and energy. When we opened that first week in January and everybody had relocated, since then, our staff and our team have really come together and are really energized, now that that phase is over.

CL: How did you handle both your core responsibilities and the move?

MB: We did have to create a little more administrative bandwidth to kind of manage the processes that went along with the relocation from Boca to here: writing up new policies and procedures, all the logistical planning, the financial planning for this first year, all that planning had to be done in advance. But at the same time, the USTA as a whole did a really good job of putting together a relocation plan that went into place about two years ago. It was very systematic, the communication with our staff was really good, so people understood what the different timelines were.