Julie Bliss Beal and Joe Steger celebrate 25 years at USTA Eastern

USTA Eastern is proud to recognize staff members Julie Bliss Beal and Joe Steger, who will both celebrate 25 years of service with the organization in 2025. Bliss Beal currently serves as the section’s managing director of strategy and competition, while Steger is the community tennis coordinator for the western and northern New York regions.

Julie Bliss Beal

Bliss Beal joined the Eastern team fresh out of college, accepting a position as an assistant in Eastern’s competitive department. She’d grown up playing junior tournaments all across the section, so submitting her resume for a role related to the sport felt just right—even as she entertained other entry-level opportunities from large corporations.

“Right away everyone that I met and interviewed with, it just felt comfortable,” she recalls. “We already had a common passion, and that was tennis.”

Executive Director Jenny Schnitzer, who herself celebrated 30 years with the section in 2022, notes that Bliss Beal’s “welcoming, friendly personality” was evident from the moment she stepped into the USTA Eastern office and has always been a major asset to the organization —and in particular its competitive operation.

“Any time you go out [to competitive events], you’ll always hear people say, ‘Julie always talks to me, Julie always calls me back, Julie’s always willing to go the extra mile,’” Schnitzer says. “That’s just her personality. But she also has the work ethic and the vision.”

For her part, Bliss Beal is extremely grateful to be able to work in a sport she first discovered and loved as a five year old, when she and her sister would bring their “little chairs” to sit and watch their dad play in the nearby park.

“Eastern is a team effort,” she says. “I’ve just been extremely blessed to be a part of this organization and learn from the people around me.”

Joe Steger

Steger too joined the organization just as he was graduating from college, after a couple summers running sports programming at a nearby park. He recalls that on his first day, the entire staff headed out to the US Open where they enjoyed the tournament from the comfort of the president’s suite inside Arthur Ashe Stadium.

“I was like, ‘It can only go downhill from here!’” he says with a laugh. “But no, it has definitely gone up.”

Annual jaunts to Flushing Meadows aside, Steger has always worked remotely in Buffalo, N.Y., where for the entirety of his career he has helped bring tennis to local schools, parks departments and other community organizations across upstate N.Y. As a young twentysomething fresh out of school and somewhat disconnected—at least by distance—from the Westchester-based staff, the gig presented some challenges in the early days.

“Joe is one-of-a-kind,” says Kathy Connelly, who leads the Buffalo chapter of ACEing Autism, an organization that aims to get kids with disabilities involved in tennis. “When I go to national ACEing Autism meetings, other program directors are always searching for ideas on how to get volunteers or how to get publicity for their programming. I keep saying, ‘Find your community tennis coordinator!’ We are so fortunate we get a lot of things done here because of Joe.”

Fostering these relationships—connecting people from all different areas of the tennis ecosystem—is what Steger has enjoyed most about his role at Eastern.

“The best part of this job has been building these connections and trying to make the sport as accessible as possible for people of all ability levels and from all different parts of upstate, from the bigger cities to the rural areas. There's certainly plenty of spots still left to grow. In the last few years, we've been able to do a ton [organizing] adaptive and wheelchair [programming] in this region, and that's awesome. We talk a lot about tennis being an inclusive sport, and I think that shows that it is, that anybody can play tennis and have fun with it. So I really like that part of it, which is probably why I've been on the community team at Eastern for 25 years!”