For many years, Sonoma Academy has talked about building tennis courts. At some points, it seemed sure to happen, like in 2022 when a brief news article was published on the SA website. It confidently stated, “Four tennis courts will be constructed to the south of Ziemer Field, allowing our thriving tennis program to practice and compete at home, as well as new opportunities for our students to engage in tennis and pickleball.” It has been 4 years without the tennis courts, so what’s happening?
There has always been something getting in the way: from building the Performing Arts Center instead, to finances, to a Head of School transition. Director of Athletics Chris Ziemer said that although the tennis court project is on pause right now, “it doesn’t mean that down the road we wouldn’t like to have it.”
Ziemer remembered that when our school first moved to the campus, the only athletic teams were fall soccer, winter basketball and spring lacrosse. Ziemer explained the state of the campus at that time: “There were holes that could swallow small children on that pitch. When we first moved here, it was dirt and rocks. We used to have rock picking parties. Like ninety minutes before every game, there would be rock picking parties and everybody would just pick up the rocks and fill in the holes.”
Sonoma Academy’s growth established a need for better and more easily maintained athletic facilities. “As we added tennis, you start trying to find courts, and then you know, people are like, ‘hey, where are your courts on campus?’” Ziemer said.
The plan for the project has changed a lot since it was first envisioned: originally, the idea included an outdoor basketball court and pickleball courts. Now, if the plan follows through, we would most likely get four tennis courts, a track and baseball batting cages all built at the same time.
The problem halting this plan, according to Head of School Percy Abram, is that “the school has, at least for now, decided that we want to have a larger, broader athletics plan before we go ahead and commit to putting those tennis courts there.”
That is to say that we have undergone multiple large construction projects in the last few years, and some people think that rather than going through another one, we should focus on building our community. In Spring 2024, the PAC was still being finished. If it hadn’t been built, we would consider the Guild and Commons (GAC), which was completed in 2018, to be the ‘new project’.
Some students are upset, especially the tennis team. As Lynna Xu (‘26) said, “We were promised tennis courts freshman year and they still haven’t done it.” She went on to say that she’d talked to alumni who told her they were promised tennis courts their freshman year.
In the end, we may see tennis courts in the future at Sonoma Academy, and we may see other projects like a track or batting cages. We might even see new buildings someday. But for now, the school does not believe it is the right time for major construction, and as Director of External Relations Kim Eber said, “[We should] really focus on what the people and programs are that we want to make sure are not only surviving, but thriving.”
