This should be the golden age of women’s tennis. Never before have so many spectacular athletes graced the sport at one time: Venus and Serena Williams, the Belgian duo of Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin-Hardenne, Maria Sharapova and a swarm of Russians, and, not too far behind, a collection of Eastern European and Chinese women who seem to improve each month.

Despite all these fine components, the sum of the tour’s parts is greater than its whole.As the U.S. Open arrives, the women’s tour is coming off a trying summer, one that has upset fans and tennis officials alike. Injuries have decimated the field, and most of the top players feel burdened by the 11-month schedule. Last-minute withdrawals are common. Tournament directors have little confidence in their ability to field an attractive slate of players, and the biggest names in the sport think nothing of paying penalties to add a week of rest.

In New Haven this week, Amelie Mauresmo and Henin-Hardenne, the two top-ranked women in the world, finally played their first matches since their excellent Wimbledon final in early July. During this summer’s U.S. Open Series, three of the five tournaments attracted fewer than five of the top 10 players in the world. Only four showed up at the Rogers Cup in Montreal last week, and two pulled out mid-tournament with injuries (Clijsters’s wrist will prevent her from defending her title at the U.S. Open). Sharapova withdrew on the eve of the event because she was tired (cost: $150,000). When rain postponed the final until Monday, the tournament offered discounted tickets to entice fans to watch Martina Hingis endure a beating at the hands of Ana Ivanovic.

“We need to make some significant changes to our circuit structure so we don’t have what’s happening today during the summer circuit, and other parts of the year,” the president of the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour, Stacey Allaster, said. “I think everyone knows the issues, now we need to find the solutions.”

The answer that Allaster and the WTA president, Larry Scott, have proposed goes by the name “Roadmap 2010.”

Under the plan, women’s tennis would have a two-month off-season, and players would be required to play 11 events in addition to the four major tournaments, down from the current 13. Ideally, breaks would occur after each Grand Slam, though the majors are autonomous and reluctant to accept change — the French Open and Wimbledon, separated by a few weeks, are unlikely to budge.

Participation would be mandatory, barring injury, at three or four Tier I tournaments, one rung below the majors. (The women had their first such event this year at the Nasdaq 100 in Miami; the men already have nine required Masters Series events, a number that some in tennis believe is too high.) Penalties for withdrawals or failing to fulfill pre-season commitments might become more severe than money, such as deductions in ranking points, though a tour spokesman said no specific plans are on the table. Last week, the tour perhaps foreshadowed a stern future when it decided against allowing Lindsay Davenport to enter the Rogers Cup, as she had failed to commit to any summer events by the tour’s spring deadline and was therefore ineligible for wild cards.

Those changes are merely the finishing touches on what could amount to a gut renovation. As soon as 2009, Scott and Allaster plan to reduce the number of Tier I and II events to 14 or 15 from the present total of 26. Somewhere, in a few American cities and others in Europe and Asia, tournaments will die. The question is which ones.

“We need to reduce,” the founder of the women’s tour, Billie Jean King, who will be honored next week when the U.S. National Tennis Center in Flushing is renamed in her honor, said. “We need to have less tournaments at the top level. It’s a very demanding sport. There’s so many injuries with both the men and the women.”

One victim looks to be the Acura Classic in San Diego. The tournament had $50,000 in total prize money when it began in 1984; this year, it offered $1.3 million in its 16th consecutive year at the La Costa Resort & Spa. In an unusual move, the women’s tour purchased the rights to the tournament this summer. Although no final decision has been made, the tour likely will not hold a Tier I event in San Diego after next year. Instead, it might look to create a larger field in Cincinnati, alongside the popular men’s tournament.

The Toray Pan Pacific Open, held in Tokyo the week after the Australian Open and the recipient of a weak field this year, could be another target. The portion of the season that might feel the most pain, though, is the summer hard court season in America.

“I honestly don’t know why the whole sport doesn’t go dark for three weeks after Wimbledon,” a former pro who is now a television commentator, Mary Carillo, said.

Carillo was referring to the men’s tour, too, as Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and other top European players already tend to take a month off after Wimbledon to recover.

“We keep trying to extend this hard court season,” she said. “No top player wants to support the length of the hard court season as it exists now.”

Thoughts like this concern the United States Tennis Association, which has poured thousands of hours, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, into its now three-year-old U.S. Open Series. Whatever one might say about the Series, it certainly has helped to increase television coverage of tennis, and has brought a wealthy new sponsor into the fray — Lever 2000, which is owned by Unilever. Its use of instant replay has proved successful with fans and on television.

Allaster speaks highly of the Series, but noted that the tour has international demands that must be met.

“We want to work with them and take it to the next level,” Allaster said. “What we have today is not going to do that. We’ll also have to balance that with our European partners. The same issues we have in North American we have in Europe.”

Despite its self-professed shortcomings, the women’s tour remains the most successful women’s sport in the world, and it has not suffered in terms of television ratings.

In the last two years, women’s events shown on ESPN2 as part of the U.S. Open Series consistently have reached more households than men’s events. The figures from this summer illustrate a marked difference compared with last year. The four men’s tournaments shown on ESPN2 — the Countrywide Classic in Los Angeles, the Legg Mason Tennis Classic in Washington, D.C., the Rogers Masters in Toronto, and the Western & Southern Financial Group Masters in Cincinnati — all declined, losing between 13,000 households (in Cincinnati) and 118,000 (in Los Angeles), according to ESPN.

Three of the four comparable women’s events saw gains, including an increase of 151,000 households at the Acura Classic in San Diego, where Sharapova defeated Clijsters in the final. The only event to lose households, by a count of 110,000, was the Bank of West Classic, the first Tier II event following Wimbledon (Clijsters defeated Patty Schnyder in the final).

Allaster stressed that no final decisions have been made about which tournaments to cut, though a lot could be decided in the next nine to 12 months. Otherwise, stay tuned until 2010.

tperrotta@nysun.com