Sportime Randall’s Island, a relatively new 20-court tennis center in New York, has asked to postpone a committee vote on its potential expansion while it seeks to clear up what it considers to be confusion about the nature of the expansion in the surrounding communities.
Sportime wants to add nine more courts as part of a $5 to $7 million expansion, but has run into opposition from some community groups in East Harlem and the South Bronx, which say that the court fees are too high.
The Sportime tennis center is one of the only new facilities in the New York metro area and demand for court time at the 20-court tennis center is extremely high, so much that in just over two years of existence the company’s management was confident that it could install nine new courts in a dirt parking lot next door and immediately fill them players.
The NY Metro area has lost about 75 courts over the past the past decade, so the demand from recreational players for both indoors and outdoor courts has become extremely high.
Mark McEnroe, the Managing Director of Sportime Randall’s Island and the John McEnroe Tennis Academy and brother to John and USTA Player Development head Patrick, told TENNIS.com that the company has gone out of its way to provide thousands of hours of free indoor and outdoor tennis programming to under-resourced children in partnership with the parks departments and schools. He also says that Sportime provides financial aid to the McEnroe Tennis Academy students and estimates that some 1,000 children play at the facility each year. He estimates the facility provides 20,000 free court hours annually.
But some neighborhood and park preservation groups in East Harlem and the South Bronx say that Sportime not fully engaged with the local community and that locals have not been able to weigh in on the project enough.
Geoffrey Croft, president of New York City Park Advocates, told the Manhatten web site DNInfo that: “Expanding should not be a consideration until they deal with the issues there now and explain why the community is not benefiting in the way that it should from such a large project."
The nonprofit Randall’s Island Sports Foundation manages the site and has already overseen $130 million in projects on the island, which was once an underused, deteriorating tract of land. Over the past four years, over 60 athletic playing fields have been rebuilt, many of which are homes to league games for a variety of schools.
McEnroe says that Sportime has never asked the city or parks department for a penny and financed its $18 million facility by itself. It also pays approximately $1 million per year to the parks department. He added that 50% of the new facility’s tennis court inventory is designated for holders of standard parks permits during daytime hours from May 1 through mid-October, even though the courts are maintained and operated at Sportime’s sole expense.
Additional license fees from the expansion could represent an estimated $400,000 to $500,000 per year for park maintenance, operations and programming.
“When John and I decided to start the academy and work with Sportime, the main thing we were aiming for was to address the lack of courts in the city and to introduce more and more kids to tennis,” Mark McEnroe said.
McEnroe says that the postponement of the hearing will not delay the current time-line of the project, because the land use process is a 18-24 month process at best.
In a statement, Sportime said. “We are committed to the project and believe that it will be an absolute win/win for the Park, the surrounding communities, and NYC as a whole.” – Matt Cronin