Tennis Jamaica secures funding, eyes new 12-court facility
WITH the International Tennis Federation’s (ITF) M15000 World Tennis Tour Futures series returning to the island this month, president of Tennis Jamaica John Azar says his Administration is looking for a new home to support their efforts to secure more high-level tennis competition for the island.
Jamaica’s tennis headquarters, Eric Bell National Tennis Centre located off Marescaux Road in Kingston, and the Liguanea Club in New Kingston are currently hosting the series.
Azar says his Administration is looking to deepen its partnership with ITF and host other international tournaments on the island, stating his ambition to stage over 20 weeks of tennis in Jamaica on a yearly basis.
In order to accomplish this, Tennis Jamaica is hoping to develop a new 12-court international facility, with Azar noting that the funding has already been secured in large part, with only a few other critical details left to be ironed out.
“Many people do it the other way where they try and source a facility, or conceptualise that, and then source the funding but, for better or worse, we have gone the other way — we have funding in place and we are now in advanced negotiations on where that facility would be housed. But our plans include hosting simultaneous men’s and women’s tournaments like this, week in and week out, and in order to do that we would need to have a world-class facility so, hopefully, we will be able to speak more about that in a couple weeks,” Azar told the Jamaica Observer.
Azar believes the venue would play a significant role in developing the sport in Jamaica and across the region, and shared that the plan is for the facility to boast multiple playing surfaces as well as feature a stadium court.
“We envision having a world-class tennis facility here in Jamaica that will become the centrepiece of tennis, not just here in Jamaica but also across the wider Caribbean and the region,” Azar said. “It’s something that we are excited about and look forward to expounding on.
“A facility like that, you are looking at a minimum of 12 courts, a stadium court included, different court surfaces [such as] hard court, clay court, and so on.”
“In terms of the budget, I wouldn’t want to comment on that because that’s subject to a number of factors including escalation. Funding is always a challenge, but in this case I would say that our greater challenge is just tying down that arrangement with where the facility is going to be located,” Azar added.
