The Orcas Island Park and Rec District has been awarded a $5000 matching grant from the United States Tennis Association to refurbish and re-line two of the existing Buck Park tennis courts.
“This grant was just one of a series of dominos that had to fall into place to allow our community to refurbish and reenergize a public tennis program for Orcas,” said rec district board chair Martha Farish. “It took Carl deBoor and the Community Foundation donating the cost of insurance; it took the Port of Orcas’s willingness to loan OIPRD interim funding; it took Attorney Adina Cunningham’s willingness to help us both come to agreement and it took the school district’s willingness to have OIPRD take the lead on refurbishment of the courts.”
The matching grant, along with interim funding from the Port of Orcas will allow the courts to be refurbished in August 2011 instead of August 2013, when tax distributions would have allowed the district to do the work. Tennis court construction constraints restrict refurbishment in the Northwest to August, when the weather is hot enough.
Of the park’s three regulation size courts, two are fenced. The third is an unfenced poured slab to the north of the existing courts, unfinished due to insufficient funds when Buck Park was originally created.
The rec district applied for grant monies to finish all three courts, but were not able to garner the funds needed to do so.
“Altogether we just didn’t have the financial horses – or enough lead time – to get the last $6000 required to get it all done all at once,” said Farish.
The refurbished courts will have an added feature: lining for Quick Start Tennis, a national tennis emphasis by the US Tennis Association that offers smaller regulation court size, easier instruction and tournaments for beginners. The program is sometimes called “10 and under” tennis.
“Parks and Rec is about people getting out and recreating,” said Janet Brownell, Orcas Island School District board chair. “Through this community effort, and the promise of free USTA training clinics in Quick Start for coaches, school personnel and community volunteers, Orcas will have encouraged greater participation by every age group in tennis in our community.”
Under grant terms, the work must be done by a US Tennis Association approved contractor.
“The best choice was Mid Pac Construction of Kirkland, Wash. who turned out to have done successful private court work on Orcas in the past,” said Joe Ciskowski, representative of Orcas Tennis Association, which spearheaded the refurbishment campaign this January.
The work is scheduled for the week of Aug. 25. Upon completion, the courts will be locked and unavailable for four or five days to allow the surfaces to “cure.”
