Yep it was the Galleria where Rice always plays their indoor matches. While there are some props for this tournament (admission free, Leander Paes and James Blake were also there giving autographs), there were some massive head scratchers:
-Tournament being announced in August. I've almost never have seen a tournament added with such a short turnaround.
-Rice (though the facility is new) was not the first choice. Heard another tennis club declined to host.
-Had a Friday night block 'party' if you could call it that. Just two food trucks and a DJ.
-Oracle is sponsoring a lot of tournaments (NCAA to these pro level ones) to grow American tennis. But they did a pretty poor job promoting it to the public. For the Peng vs. Pegula match, I estimate about 80% of the crowd was Asian with a lot being Rice international graduate students. Peng had huge crowd support.
-To attract more of a crowd, they ran couple UTR double tournaments for the public. I think the Rice varsity players were forced to participate in it. It is not fun watching reluctant NCAA athletes beating up on kids 5-6 years younger than them. Many of the kids weren't even bad, a lot of them had the Super Champ rating.
-The rush to play both finals that Sunday. It's not like Peng, Davis, Kahn, and Smith (still a Baylor athlete, dangerous one to look out this spring) had another tournament to go to in the middle of November.