The transfer of the sanction for the WTA tournament in Carlsbad, Calif., "has been approved" by the WTA BOD and the event "will be moved to Tokyo" in '14, according to Matt Cronin of TENNIS.com. The WTA tourney at Stanford Univ. "will move into Carlsbad’s week on the calendar, beginning on July 28, while the new tournament in Tokyo will be played the week of September 15." Octagon, which owns the WTA Carlsbad sanction, "will run the tournament in Tokyo at an undetermined site." A group in Tokyo "sold its WTA Premier 5 level sanction to a group from Wuhan, China, last year." There will "now be three weeks in between the end of Wimbledon and the start of Stanford" without a WTA tourney in the U.S. Southern California "has lost four pro-level tournaments" over the past eight years, including Carlsbad, a WTA and an ATP event in L.A., as well as the WTA Championships, which was held in downtown L.A. from ’02-05. Meanwhile, the ATP Winston-Salem Open, which is played during the same week as the WTA New Haven Open at Yale, "tried to buy the New Haven sanction and make it a combined event," but the ATP BOD "turned down the request." The sanction for the New Haven event is "still being shopped around, but until a decision is made, it will remain on the 2014 WTA calendar in that city and time slot" (TENNIS.com, 9/13).
