Survive the Multi-Court Madness: Your US Open Second-Week Playbook

If you survived the first week of scouring multiple screens and apps during the US Open, take a breath. The tournament is officially shifting gears in its second week, and for fans watching at home, that means the viewing experience is about to get an upgrade just in time for Labor Day weekend.

Keeping up with what’s happening in Flushing Meadows in the opening rounds can feel like a marathon or extreme sport all on its own. Across that first week, hundreds of athletes play across dozens of outer courts in back-to-back, consecutive hours of simultaneous play, with devout tennis fans juggling split screens and constant channel-surfing just to track everything at home. 

Friday and Saturday mark the conclusion of the third round, and the tournament heads into Sunday and Monday’s Round of 16, which narrows the singles fields from 32 to the final 16 players. The action moves from the outside courts into Louis Armstrong Stadium and Arthur Ashe Stadium for the Round of 16 matches, before eventually narrowing those 16 down to eight and moving to Arthur Ashe entirely for the quarterfinals, semifinals, and championship games. So while the stakes are higher for the players heading into the second week, the chaos clears for those watching at home.

Here’s why: The broadcast landscape shifts into appointment-viewing TV, meaning you can go from rummaging through apps and channels for concurrent matches and trade it for a more streamlined experience with a single, scheduled broadcast event from start to finish. Instead of watching the outer-court feeds, viewers get the luxury of prime network coverage, including dedicated weekend windows that broadcast directly on ABC. 

Navigating it all over a long holiday weekend still requires a bit of a playbook. If you don’t have cable or aren’t sitting in front of a standard TV tuned to ABC, ESPN, or ESPN2, you can stream the action live through the ESPN App if you have a TV provider login or subscription.

Plus, streaming services like YouTube TV, Fubo, and Sling TV make it easy to keep the feed running alongside college football and NFL opening games. If you treat Ashe and Armstrong like your prestige TV events, that makes for the ultimate combination for a holiday sports marathon.