Tennis in the Land
The new Topnotch Stadium, soon host to the third Tennis in the Land come August, could, founder Kyle Ross said, lead to a permanent stadium in the next five years.
That's what Kyle Ross, the tournament director of Tennis in the Land, believes might happen in the next five years or so. As, due to the increasing success of the week-long, globally-reaching competition in the past two years, Ross thinks it's high time to bring professional and collegiate tennis Downtown. And not just for five days at a time.
Turnout numbers for the pro women's tennis competition suggest the support might be there. In 2021, the five-day showcase brought 14,000 attendees to Jacobs Pavilion at Nautica. In 2022, with night matches and extended hours, that draw rose to 16,000. With $200,000 in ticket sales made in just two days, Ross is "pushing 18,000" as this year's goal.
With a brand new (temporary) 2,000-seat Topnotch Stadium set to rise this August in a nearby parking lot, Ross thinks the upgrade addition foretells Tennis in the Land's future as a fixture—and keeping it Downtown.
"That's kind of our ultimate goal and direction and journey of [where] our tournament needs to be," Ross told Scene, regarding a permanent stadium. Which, he added, would make more sense from a cost and labor standpoint. (Nearly 40,000 pounds of parts need to be assembled.) A temporary stadium is, he said, "hard, it's expensive and it takes a lot of energy and bandwidth that goes along with it. We don't want to make that the format we do on an annual basis.
"This is an annual tournament," Ross said, "and we're trying to keep it here for 30 years."
And keep it, Ross doubled down on, Downtown. In the city. Near the water.
A lasting home for Tennis In the Land would also offer downtown something it doesn't have.
After all, according to Tennis Cleveland, there are no public, outdoor tennis courts in downtown, or in the inner ring neighborhoods, save for one at the Michael Zone Rec Center on West 65th and Lorain Ave. As a result, tennis culture in Cleveland, as elsewhere, is mostly a suburban affair.
Until around 1988, Downtown Cleveland hosted hundreds of tennis events at the 3,000-seat Harold T. Clark Tennis Courts, situated south of Burke Lakefront Airport, named after a lawyer who helped pull mainstays like the Western Open to Cleveland. After it was abandoned in 1988, all downtown matches were booked at the Gund Arena, now the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse.
In Ross's mind, the opportunity to birth a long-lasting tennis hub in the city's center is ripe. He points to the Atlanta Open for example, which constructs a tennis village every year near Union Station, in Atlanta's urban core.
"It's all about energy and interest," Ross said. "We don't want to be an event in the suburbs. We want to be a tournament in the heart of the city."
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