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Tennis might not literally save the planet.
But the newest ideas around court design point to something much bigger than tennis.
Penn architecture students just won a national USTA design competition with a concept that turns a tennis facility into climate infrastructure.
Rainwater capture.
Permeable surfaces.
Shade.
Solar.
Cooling systems.
Landscape designed to manage heat and stormwater.
The interesting part is what this says about the future of public space.
For a long time, we designed things to do one job.
A tennis court hosted tennis.
A storm drain handled water.
A power system generated energy.
A park provided recreation.
But in a hotter, denser, more expensive world, every acre may have to do more.
A court can host a match and manage water.
A park can cool a neighborhood.
A roof can generate power.
A sports facility can become part of the climate system.
That’s a much bigger idea than “sustainable tennis.”
Maybe the future of public infrastructure is simply this:
stop asking what one space is for, and start asking how many problems it can solve.
The tennis court of the future might still have a net in the middle.
It just might have a job too.
#tennis #tenniscourt #realestate #sportsbusiness #sportds
Transcript
Is probably gonna make a lot of people upset, but tennis might save the planet, which is a lot of responsibility for a sport whose biggest environmental innovation to this point has been changing the color of the towel bin. Regardless, UTSA just held a competition challenging architecture students to design courts for a hotter, wetter future. And Penn's winning idea takes a court and turns it into climate infrastructure. And in the project, they explained that a tennis court isn't just about hosting people anymore. It's about managing water with permeable surfaces, cooling public space with solar shades, and generating energy for the future data centers next good, which points to a much bigger idea here. Stadiums and sports infrastructure of the future will not be allowed to do just one job, and that's because public funding is gonna be tied more towards how does this acre solve multiple problems for us. And in the case of tennis, USTA does tell us that tennis is surging, but the demand for more and more paddle facilities is putting the pressure on these people to make sure that every acre counts. It's kind of sick though that courts of the future will take stormwater and transition it into the energy that cools the sidewalk in your neighborhood. But I'm still not putting my clubs down for a racket. Either way, if you're building in tennis right now, comment connect down below, and send this to a green friend.
