Tennis clubs care about the planet but struggle to act, new questionnaire reveals

Ask a tennis coach whether the planet matters and the answer is almost always yes. Ask whether their club is actually doing something about it, and the picture gets murkier. That disconnect between caring and acting is now measurable, thanks to a new instrument developed by an international research team working under the Erasmus+ GreenTennis project. The tool, called GreenTennis-SUSCLUB, was designed to diagnose environmental sustainability in tennis clubs from the perspective of the people who run them, and its first validation study has just been published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living.

The questionnaire arrives at a moment when sport is under growing pressure to clean up its act. The International Olympic Committee has embedded environmental criteria into its Olympic Agenda 2020+5, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals urge responsible practices across all sectors, and the European Union Work Plan for Sport 2021–2024 explicitly calls on federations and clubs to reduce their environmental footprint. Yet researchers have long noted a frustrating gap: while institutional recommendations pile up, grassroots sports organizations lack standardized tools to translate those lofty frameworks into concrete, operational diagnoses of what is actually happening on the ground. Scales exist for environmental attitudes in outdoor physical activity and for green practices as seen by users of sporting events, but almost nothing targets the professionals who make decisions inside local clubs.

To fill that void, the research team, led by scientists at the Catholic University of Murcia in Spain with collaborators in the Netherlands, Brazil, and beyond, built an instrument with 34 items in total. Six capture sociodemographic information, 25 are closed Likert-scale items scored from 1 to 5 and organized into five theoretical dimensions, and three are open-ended questions probing barriers, good practices, and opportunities for improvement. The five dimensions reflect decades of psychological research on pro-environmental behavior: Knowledge, Attitudes, Current practices, Barriers/Needs, and Self-efficacy/Commitment. The theoretical backbone draws on the Theory of Planned Behavior, the influential model holding that behavior depends not only on attitudes but also on perceived behavioral control, subjective norms, and the contextual constraints that surround any decision.

The development process was iterative and rigorous. A team of six university lecturers, five specialists in sports science and one psychologist, generated an initial bank of 35 questions grounded in the literature on sustainability in sport and club management. After internal refinement, the instrument moved to a content validity phase in which ten expert judges, each with at least ten years of professional experience as coaches, club managers, or tournament directors, independently rated every item for clarity, coherence with its assigned dimension, and relevance on a 4-point scale. The acceptability threshold was set at an Item Content Validity Index of 0.78, meaning at least 78 percent of judges had to rate an item as adequate or very adequate.

The results of that expert scrutiny were striking. Twenty-three of the 25 Likert items cleared the threshold across all three criteria, and only two fell short in at least one: a mobility item in the Current practices dimension scored 0.70 for relevance, and a technical-support item in Barriers/Needs scored 0.70 for clarity, coherence, and relevance. Both were reformulated before the field study. At the scale level, the overall content validity index averaged 0.931, a figure the authors describe as excellent and consistent with classical criteria for expert panels of this size. In plain terms, the experts agreed that the questionnaire captures what it claims to capture.

The field version was then administered to 99 tennis professionals from 28 European countries, with an average age of 48 years and an average of 29 years in the tennis sector. The sample included 54 coaches, 15 tournament directors, and 14 managers, mostly from private clubs. Psychometric analysis followed established guidelines, including the COSMIN framework for evaluating measurement properties. Internal consistency, estimated with both Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega, proved satisfactory to excellent for four dimensions, with alpha values ranging from 0.831 to 0.871. Exploratory factor analysis, conducted on the 25 ordinal items with minimum residuals extraction and Oblimin rotation, showed adequate sampling adequacy with a Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin index of 0.767 and a highly significant Bartlett’s test of sphericity.

Here the study delivered one of its most technically interesting findings. Parallel analysis supported a four-factor solution rather than the five theoretical dimensions the researchers had proposed. The surprise was the merger of Attitudes and Self-efficacy/Commitment into a single empirical cluster, with items such as collaborating on environmental initiatives and leading by example loading heavily together, at values up to 0.844. The authors caution that this overlap does not mean the two constructs are theoretically equivalent. Rather, in this sample of professionals, valuing sustainability and perceiving oneself as capable of promoting change appear to be experienced as part of a single, closely connected disposition toward environmental action. Because the sample-to-item ratio was roughly 4 to 1, at the borderline of what is considered adequate for exploratory factor analysis, the four-factor structure should be regarded as preliminary until replicated in larger, independent samples with confirmatory factor analysis.

The descriptive results revealed what the researchers call an attitude-behavior gap, and the numbers tell the story vividly. Pro-environmental attitudes scored a mean of 4.01 on the 5-point scale, the highest of any dimension, while the actual implementation of sustainable practices lagged at 3.47, the lowest. Knowledge sat at 3.53 and self-efficacy/commitment at 3.71. The qualitative responses converged on the same interpretation: the most frequently cited barriers were financial resources, institutional dependency, and insufficient technical training, while the good practices described were mostly low-intensity measures such as waste management, efficient water use, and basic energy efficiency. Interestingly, the Barriers/Needs dimension showed weak internal consistency, with alpha at 0.533, suggesting the block combines two related but distinct contents, perceived obstacles on one hand and perceived needs for support on the other. The authors flag this dimension as a priority for future refinement.

The study is candid about its limitations, and they matter for how the findings should be read. The sample was recruited through non-probability sampling, and 41.4 percent of respondents reported prior training in sustainability, a proportion unlikely to reflect club managers in general. This points to a probable self-selection effect in which already environmentally conscious professionals were more likely to participate, potentially inflating the favorable attitude and self-efficacy scores. The questionnaire also relies on self-reporting, leaving room for social desirability bias. And because the multilingual adaptation was carried out directly by consortium partners without a formal forward-backward translation procedure or an independent check of linguistic equivalence, item wording may not be fully equivalent across the 28 countries, introducing cultural and semantic noise that could have affected both responses and the stability of the factor solution.

Even with those caveats, the implications are significant for the broader movement to green the world of sport. The GreenTennis-SUSCLUB provides the first validated, context-specific instrument for diagnosing sustainability in tennis clubs from the perspective of decision-makers, and its mixed-methods design, combining quantitative scales with thematic analysis of open-ended responses in NVivo, offers convergent evidence that the tool captures a meaningful sustainability profile. The attitude-behavior gap it documents is not merely an individual inconsistency; the authors interpret it as a reflection of governance conditions in which favorable views coexist with ageing infrastructure, restricted autonomy, and insufficient technical support. Future research will test the five-dimensional model against the four-factor solution, evaluate measurement invariance across coaches and managers, and examine temporal stability and sensitivity to change following interventions. For now, the message to thousands of clubs across Europe is clear: the will to act is there, and now there is a scientific yardstick to measure whether that will becomes action.

Subject of Research: Tennis clubs care about the planet but struggle to act, new questionnaire reveals

Article Title: Environmental sustainability in sports clubs: development and preliminary validation of the GreenTennis-SUSCLUB questionnaire

Article References: García-Roca, J. A., Maciá-Andreu, M. J., Morales-Belando, M. T., Arranz-Escudero, J. A., Tinaz, C., Piuvezam, G., & Vegue-Parra, E. (2026). Environmental sustainability in sports clubs: development and preliminary validation of the GreenTennis-SUSCLUB questionnaire. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 8, Article 1987947. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1987947

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fspor.2026.1987947

Keywords: environmental sustainability, tennis, questionnaire validation, pro-environmental behavior, sports management, GreenTennis-SUSCLUB, psychometrics, Environmental, sustainability, sports, clubs, development