The most revealing document in Nathalie Tremblay’s career is not a campaign brief. It is a list she wrote for herself. A little more than a year before her first anniversary at Tennis Canada, Tremblay was in what she later called a professional mid-life crisis. She responded like an operator: she made requirements. Her next company needed a purpose she believed in. She wanted to work with a boss, rather than merely for one. She needed room to grow, a meaningful digital transformation to lead, and the freedom to practice empathy and vulnerability. Five personal objectives turned a foggy career moment into a usable filter.
In January 2022, that filter led her to Tennis Canada. The federation hired her to oversee digital transformation and ticketing, an assignment that sounds technical until you picture the person holding a phone outside a stadium. The fan does not see a technology stack. The fan sees a password reset, a seat map, a match schedule and a gate that either recognizes a ticket or does not. Tremblay had spent more than two decades learning that the distance between a system and a feeling is shorter than most organizations admit.
One year in, she described Tennis Canada as her “professional happy place.” By early 2024, she had become Vice-President of Marketing Strategy and Customer Experience and joined the senior management team. The speed of that rise is less interesting than the scope it reveals. Her work now runs across digital products, ticketing revenue, brand strategy and the physical experience of the National Bank Open. She is responsible for the connective tissue around the match.
Set one / The career that changes surfaces
Products change. The customer question remains.
Tremblay did not arrive in sport through a conventional sports-business route. Her public career crosses Bell, Yellow Pages Group, DAVIDsTEA, robotics company Kinova and digital consultancy Adviso. At different moments she worked on client strategy, acquisition and retention, e-commerce, CRM, brand, demand generation and business transformation. She completed an Executive MBA at Université du Québec à Montréal from 2007 to 2010 while already building that career.
Look at the nouns and the route feels eclectic: telecom, directories, tea, robots, tennis. Look at the verbs and it becomes coherent: translate, simplify, modernize, grow. At Kinova, where she became Vice-President of Marketing and Customer Experience, the product included robotic arms. In one television explanation, she made their precision concrete with an egg: the arm had become capable of holding one without breaking it. It is a marketer’s instinct, compressing sophisticated engineering into an image anyone can carry away.
She also wrote. Her subjects at Kinova included corporate responsibility, the relationship between an internal culture and an external brand, and robotics through a marketer’s lens. At Adviso, where she advised on digital transformation and customer experience, she published practical essays on data, user experience, common transformation mistakes and the discipline of doing more with less. Her writing kept returning to the human being inside the system. Technology could reorganize a business, but people still had to understand, adopt and use it.
“The opportunity to lead with empathy and vulnerability.”Nathalie Tremblay, describing one of her personal criteria for a new role
That sentence can sound soft beside revenue and roadmaps. In her career, it sits next to them. Former colleagues have publicly described her as supportive, positive, encouraging and direct about results. When she announced her promotion, Tremblay named the leaders who had trusted her, thanked the team around her and framed the milestone as collective progress. She does not separate the emotional conditions of work from the commercial output. Both are operating inputs.
Set two / One tournament, two cities
Good experience design hides the org chart.
The National Bank Open presents a peculiar design challenge. It combines ATP and WTA tennis across Toronto and Montreal, with the men’s and women’s events alternating cities each year. To an insider, that structure is tradition. To a casual visitor, it can be a small maze. Which players are in which city? Which ticket should I buy? Why does the event appear to have two homes? A federation may be organized by departments, venues and tours. A fan experiences one decision at a time.
The tournament is one long rally
A digital team led by Tremblay helped merge separate tournament websites into one destination. The rebuilt journey clarified the annual city alternation, streamlined ticket paths, combined information for fans and expanded the digital value available to sponsors. It also made room for newcomers, with content explaining tennis history, rules and etiquette. The work received recognition from the Information is Beautiful Awards in 2023. Its useful idea is simpler than an award: do not make customers learn the shape of your organization before they can enjoy its product.
The commercial result mattered too. Tennis Canada says Tremblay led the Montreal stadium sales team to record tournament revenue in 2023. Revenue does not prove that every friction disappeared, but it gives the transformation a scoreboard. This was not modernization as décor. Digital maturity connected to seats sold, sponsors served and fans moving through the event with less confusion.
Tremblay’s promotion announcement tied those gains to a “Digital Transformation roadmap” and to the people who carried it. Her language mixed gratitude with the vocabulary of operations: maturity, commercial success, objectives and future growth. That combination is a clue to her style. She prefers purpose with a plan attached.
Set three / Beyond the baseline
A match can be the centre without being the whole.
In 2025, the National Bank Open expanded into a two-week format and introduced a new identity called Tennis Playground. The platform pushed the tournament beyond a schedule of matches and toward a summer experience, with entertainment, food and social spaces surrounding the on-court action. The strategic bet was not to dilute the tennis. It was to give more kinds of fans more ways into it.
“Ultimately, we want to create an environment where tennis is for all.”Nathalie Tremblay at the Tennis Playground launch
That line contains a large promise. Tremblay specified backgrounds, abilities and age groups. The practical work lives in ordinary details: useful content for someone attending a first match, an email that renders properly, food worth staying for, a social space between sessions, and a brand that can hold Toronto and Montreal at once. Inclusion is not only a campaign theme. It is whether a person can enter the experience without insider knowledge.
The new campaign treated the National Bank Open as a piece of Canadian summer culture. One creative gesture opened the winner’s traditional camera-signing ritual to a wider idea: everyone could leave a signature on the event. Tremblay described the tournament as an expression of culture, pride and gathering, as well as an economic and social contributor to its host communities. The court remained the reason to come. The playground supplied reasons to belong.
Her public comments since then keep widening the frame. When Tennis Canada reported more than six million players in Canada in 2025 and a 14 percent rise among players aged 12 to 17, Tremblay focused on lifelong participation, stronger communities and future fans. Commenting on support for emerging Canadian players, she connected athletic visibility with the long-term business of an athlete’s career. Marketing, in this view, is not an ornamental layer placed over performance. It helps build the audience, support and commercial durability around it.
Her service outside the federation follows the same line. She sits on the board of Sport Jeunesse Québec, belongs to the Canadian Marketing Association’s Customer Experience Council, and became vice-president of Association Marketing Québec. Tennis Canada also describes her as committed to coaching, teaching and developing the next generation of marketing leaders. These roles are connections between fields: youth and sport, practitioners and ideas, experienced operators and emerging talent.
Match point / A career brief fulfilled
The system should end in a feeling.
Return to the five requirements Tremblay wrote during her career reset. Purpose. A collaborative boss. Growth. A transformation worth leading. Empathy and vulnerability. They were not predictions of a job title. They described conditions under which she believed she could do useful work. Tennis Canada gave her those conditions, and she turned them outward into a similar question for fans: what conditions help a person feel that tennis is also for them?
Her path offers a compact playbook. Start with the full journey, not the department that owns each step. Translate complexity into a picture a person can grasp. Treat casual users as an audience to welcome, not a problem to correct. Connect transformation to an observable result. And choose work using criteria specific enough to change a decision.
A tennis tournament will always be measured in winners, rankings and tickets. Tremblay’s contribution sits in the spaces between those numbers: the first click, the confidence to buy, the pause between matches, the story a young fan sees, the feeling on the way home. Systems matter because they shape those moments. The marketer’s job is to make the machinery disappear at precisely the point when the experience begins.