Only 17 teams have entered the five-day tournament which started yesterday at Albury Grasscourts, down from 22 last year, with only three players in the women’s open singles.

Tournament director Ellen Gordon said a shift to the second week of the January Open could solve the player shortage.

“It would have to be in a school holiday period somewhere and those periods are chock full,” Gordon said yesterday.

“Maybe we may need to go to the second week of the Australian Open instead of the first.

“That’s maybe something we need to look at.

“The courts are fantastic we just need to get more of a message out.”

Organisers failed to get Tennis Australia sanctioning to have Australian Money Tournament status for the singles, like the Margaret Court Cup and the Wodonga Grasscourt Championships.

“We were trying to get an AMT in the singles event and thought that would be a good way of attracting players,” Gordon said.

“We were hoping to have our singles event sanctioned and unfortunately we didn’t get the sanctioning and that’s probably hurt some of our marketing.

“We will start marketing next year a bit earlier.”

Albury has five teams entered; one in the women’s event and two each in the men’s division 1 and division 2 sections.

Overall, the women’s event has four teams, the division 1 men seven and division 2 six.

The division 1 men’s singles has 12 entries and the special men’s singles seven.

The men’s singles final will be on Thursday.

Tennis NSW has a three-year deal with Albury Tennis Association to hold the event on the Border after a drop in entries forced it to shift from Sydney.