Why US Open Night Sessions Are Tennis's Best Theater

Every Grand Slam has finals. Only one has a nightly main event. The US Open's night session — first-served matches starting around 7pm in Arthur Ashe Stadium — isn't an add-on to the daytime tournament. For a lot of the sport's biggest fans, it's the whole reason to be there.

What makes it different

Arthur Ashe Stadium holds close to 24,000 people for a night session, and the crowd that shows up for one behaves differently than a daytime one. New York's night session audience is famously vocal — cheering mid-rally, reacting to a call before the chair umpire does, treating the match less like a tennis event and best described, by more than one player over the years, as closer to a concert with a scoreboard. Novak Djokovic, who has played more Grand Slam matches than almost anyone in the sport's history, has said plainly that the night sessions at the US Open are the best atmosphere in tennis.

The tournament schedules its biggest names for the evening slot deliberately — the players with the largest public profiles get the night session, both for the television audience and for what the arena becomes once the sun goes down. The result compounds on itself: bigger stars draw bigger, louder crowds, which makes the night session the reason those same stars want to play there.

A record that keeps getting broken

The night session's biggest crowd on record came on opening night of the 2024 tournament — 31,775 fans, a new all-time high for a single US Open night session. It broke the previous record of 29,402, set two years earlier during Serena Williams's farewell match in 2022. Attendance records at the US Open overall have climbed nearly every year this decade, and the night session numbers have led the way — proof that the format isn't just historically popular, it's still growing.

Why it's worth planning around

If there's one piece of practical advice buried in all of this, it's simple: a day session ticket and a night session ticket are not the same experience, even on the same court, even for the same round. The tennis can be just as good in the afternoon. The atmosphere isn't. If you're building a US Open trip around one unforgettable session, make it the one that starts after dark.