Sponsored content: This article was written by Henry Shear, founder of Standm, a social app for tennis fans, available on iOS.
There are 23,000 people inside Arthur Ashe Stadium for a night session. For most of us watching at home, the number in the room is one.
I spent four years like that. I was a student at Vanderbilt, and tennis was the thing I cared about most and the thing nobody around me followed. I’d be up at 2am for the Australian Open final, watching a match turn on a single point, and there was no one to turn to. My roommates were asleep. My group chats were about other things.
I don’t think that’s unusual, and I don’t think it’s only about tennis. The U.S. Surgeon General issued a public health advisory on loneliness in 2023, and young adults turned out to be among the loneliest people in the country — the same group that supposedly has more ways to connect than any generation before it. We have endless places to post about what we love. We have almost none where a stranger who loves the same thing becomes someone you actually know.
Fandom is supposed to be social. It’s how you end up close to people you’d otherwise never meet. There are shared nerves, storylines and irrational beliefs that evolve over the course of the year. But most of what we’re offered instead is a comment section: thousands of strangers shouting past each other, nobody there tomorrow.
I wanted something different, so I built Standm, a free app for tennis fans.
Standm matches tennis fans with other fans who love the same players. You pick yours — Sabalenka, Swiatek, Gauff, Rybakina, whoever makes you rearrange your evening — and the app puts you in conversation with people who picked them too. It’s one-on-one or small groups, capped at 15, because a room you can’t keep track of isn’t a room. There’s no feed and nothing to perform.
The conversations don’t end when the match does. That’s the whole design. Following a player is a years-long project, and the person you talked to during a first-round upset should still be there in November.
I’m not going to claim an app solves loneliness. But nobody should have to watch the best two weeks of the tennis year with no one to say did you see that to. Somewhere out there, someone was awake for the same point you were.
