The Stade Roland Garros. The All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. The USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.
What do all of these legendary venues now have in common with the U’s Eccles Tennis Center? They all offer indoor, as well as outdoor courts. Until July 2015, the Eccles Tennis Center only provided the U’s women’s and men’s tennis teams with the opportunity to host home matches in an indoor site.
Whenever weather permitted it, the men’s and women’s teams would drive to other Salt Lake City venues for outdoor playing, leaving fans frustrated and forced to leave campus to support their team. Thanks to a $1 million grant from the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation and a $250,000 grant from the Lawrence T. and Janet D. Dee Foundation, an expansion went underway to allow the tennis teams to have an outdoor home venue on campus. The venue will support seating for 388 people, along with bathrooms.
“It’s going to make a huge difference, for several reasons, not the least of which is in the last three years, probably 18 of our 24 home matches maybe have been outdoors,” said women’s tennis head coach Mat Iandolo. “That means that over two-thirds of our home matches over the last three years have been played on a public park, in what we would consider a neutral site. That would be like our football team playing a home game at Juan Diego High School’s field.”
Although they are very different sports, the comparison of the football team playing at a place like Juan Diego High School and the tennis teams playing at a public park rings true. The football program has had a steady home venue, as do other sports, and now the tennis team does as well.
In a sport so dependent on individual play, the tennis team will be able to feed off of a larger crowd at home and in turn use some of the energy provided by the fans in attendance towards their play on the court.
“We see a real big drop-off at home when we have to go off-campus, so at our home matches we were top third in the country in attendance when we played at the indoors in Eccles, and once we had to go outdoors, that crowd just kind of leaves,” said men’s tennis head coach Roeland Brateanu.
At a college level, having sporting venues on campus is big, especially for the students living on campus or with limited access to transportation. With that in mind, the crowds of fans would get smaller as the team traveled to nearby courts in what they considered home games, but with the outdoor expansion, team coaches and officials expect the same number of fans to show up as to the indoor matches at the Eccles Center, which top the attendance numbers in the Pac-12.
A problem many Utes fans face when deciding whether to attend the matches that happen on campus concern weather and determining if bad weather could cause a delay or postponement. Utes fans will not face that same problem this upcoming season, however, as the outdoor expansion allows for more flexibility with the weather.
Iandolo expands on the point by stating, “We’ll just start a match outdoors, and if the weather is bad, it starts raining or whatever, if the temperature is not right, we can decide to go indoors and everybody takes 20 steps and you have your indoor facility. So, we do anticipate bigger crowds, as big as the indoors.”
The biggest draw of the new Eccles expansion is the ability for the school to recruit the top high school prospects to commit to the U.
“[The Eccles Tennis Center outdoor expansion] will benefit us in recruiting because it has a really good look to it,” Iandolo said. “When you bring in a prospect to view our campus, they’ll see it and be very impressed by it.”
With that in mind, renovations are underway in the indoor portion as well. The outdoor addition, however, is believed to have a ripple effect, bringing more recognition to a Pac-12 tennis program from inside starting with the fan base and student sections. The addition will also garner more national attention from media and prospective student athletes looking for a top-notch program with top-of-the-line facilities.
The outdoor facility will also be accessible to students at the U for use during the upcoming fall semester.
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