How The Charleston Open Shed Light On Tennis’ Prize-money Economics

DANIEL ISLAND, S.C. — When Jessica Pegula lifted the trophy at the Charleston Open on Sunday, she became a part of tennis history. Her $2.3-million winner’s check marked the first time a standalone WTA 500 tournament, the level two rungs below a Grand Slam, awarded prize money equal to that of men’s event of the same level.

At the previous three WTA 500 events in 2026, the winner took home roughly $1.2 million, the minimum for a women’s tournament of that level. But sponsor Credit One Bank offered a prize package of nearly double that in Charleston — $2.5 million in total, $200,000 of which will go to the tour’s player benefit program, which covers benefits including health insurance and pensions.

“Upping the prize money, setting the standard very high, I think us as players really appreciate that, and it’s amazing what you’ve been doing for our sport,” Pegula said Sunday, after defeating Yuliia Starodubtseva of Ukraine 6-2, 6-2 to claim her second consecutive title in Charleston.

The Charleston Open is the first WTA 500 to proactively offer equal prize money, years ahead of the WTA’s pledge to have equal prize money at 500-level events by 2033. But the commitment is not a subsidy, the tournament’s director, Bob Moran, said in an interview earlier this week inside a suite at Stadium Court.

Instead, Moran said, the tournament’s ability to provide equal pay without forsaking its bottom line has much to do with an asset women’s sports events and leagues have spent decades fighting for: television exposure.

“We have doubled partnerships. We have doubled our hospitality, and we doubled our ticket sales in a very short period of time,” Moran said.

“I’m not going to subsidize prize money where I’m losing money on this event. To break even is not our goal. We want to continue to grow the event, make more money, and the more money we make, the more is going to go back to the players.

“In this case, with Credit One stepping up and allowing us to hit those numbers, our ticket sales allowing us to hit those numbers that we see as growth indicators, once we hit that total revenue number, it made sense for us.”

Ben Navarro, whose daughter Emma is a top-30 WTA player, is a significant minority owner of Credit One, which supported the prize-money increase. Navarro, a billionaire, made his money in debt collection and credit facilities.

The Charleston Open has long had a positive reputation among its players. Founded in 1973, it is the longest-standing women-only event in North America, and its facilities underwent a $50-million renovation and expansion in 2022.

The 11,000-seat main stadium feels just intimate enough, and while engaged fans fill the grounds each year, the tournament feels lowkey, thanks in large part to its temperate Southern locale.

“The tournament works with the players, the players work with the fans. And it’s just, to me, just one of like the best ecosystems to work in,” Madison Keys said in a news conference this week.

“Everyone loves Charleston. Everyone loves playing here. Everyone loves coming here.”

Investing in updated facilities helped make the tournament more attractive to players and ticket-holders alike, especially those attendees who aren’t necessarily tennis fans but rather people looking for family-friendly programming with food and entertainment.

“We create this whole experience on our opening weekend, which drives the boat on the opening. The quality of the tennis is great, we know that,” Moran said.

“But at the same time, we need other people who don’t experience tennis to just come out. So we create a whole atmosphere.”

Moran counts the 2016 decision to leave ESPN and sign a deal with Tennis Channel that drastically increased live coverage of the event, two years before the WTA struck a deal with the network to move all of its events over before the 2019 season, as another catalyst.

ESPN previously aired limited coverage of the week-long event on Thursday and Friday nights, in addition to two hours of coverage each on Saturday and Sunday for the tournament’s semifinals and finals.

The deal with the Tennis Channel entails first-to-last-ball coverage throughout the event. The network also installs a studio desk on the grounds, just as it does for events of higher stature, including Grand Slams.

Players coming off court often head straight to the desk for a televised post-match interview then stick around to sign autographs with the fans who routinely surround the Tennis Channel set to watch the proceedings.

It’s a cozy type of setup that Keys said can be instrumental in convincing casual fans to follow women’s tennis more closely, especially in a one-week format more concise than most of the sport’s more prestigious events, which run to 12 days (most WTA 1000s) or two weeks (Grand Slams).

“I think you have the opportunity to get the people who are on the fence of being the casual fan. A lot of that comes through story-telling and showing the personalities of the players,” Keys said.

“I have found that tennis fans will religiously follow you and wake up and watch all of your matches when they get to know you, because they feel a connection.”

For as much as the players lauded the tournament’s pioneering commitment to equal pay, other tour events don’t have the specific advantages Charleston enjoys. Navarro is a tournament owner with a personal stake in the success of women’s tennis, in addition to a business stake.

The Charleston Open owns its media rights, meaning it can distribute match footage and supplemental coverage as it pleases, which is not a given for other events on the circuit, and women’s events that combine with men’s events across classes naturally have a bigger expense sheet.

Navarro also holds the license to the Cincinnati Open, an ATP and WTA 1000 event for which Moran is also the tournament director. In 2025, it awarded just over $750,000 to its women’s singles champion, compared with just over $1.1 million to its men’s champion. The total prize pools were $5.2 million against $9.1 million; for 2026, they will be $7.4 million and $9.4 million, as a 2027 equal-pay deadline the WTA laid out for combined 1,000-level events looms.

Moran attributed the pay gap to the fact that ATP tournaments on average receive revenue in excess of their prize-money pools from the tour, while WTA tournaments receive less than their prize-money pools.

“We’ve got to continue to narrow that gap,” Moran said, through means such as attracting more sponsor partners and cashing in on a growing media rights market across women’s sports.

Pegula is hopeful that Charleston’s early commitment will spur other WTA tournaments to increase prize money as well.

“Sometimes you need someone to kind of step up and set the standard and set the bar for others to follow,” she said in a news conference this week. “I think that’s what [Navarro] has done, and I think in turn that you will see probably some 500s maybe on that path. Maybe not right away, but maybe sooner than they had planned, because now all of a sudden the standard is set higher. I think it creates a really nice healthy competition amongst the tournaments.”

Pegula said she views the tournament’s commitment as achieving two things, aside from the obvious hefty payday.

The prize money bump holds other WTA tournaments of similar sizes accountable, she said, and it helps spread awareness among fans who may not know that women tennis players, for the bulk of the season, compete for less prize money compared to their male counterparts.

“Even though we are equal at the Grand Slams, it’s definitely not equal at all the rest of the tournaments,” Pegula said.

“It kind of just puts a spotlight, again, on women’s sports. It’s growing, and Ben (Navarro) being able to put the money behind that and showcase that he wants to stand up for our sport and pay us what he thinks we deserve, I think, [sets] that standard for the rest of the tour to hopefully one day follow.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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