We’re getting our tennis courts resurfaced!

Unfortunately we’ll have to play the winter ALTA season before they’re redone.

Having your neighborhood tennis courts resurfaced can be very exciting. Yes, there is downtime when you have to find another place to play for a week or so (weather permitting) while the courts are being resurfaced, but then you’ll have years of enjoyment before having to worry about having them redone again.

In my old neighborhood, the process was expensive and few and far between and it didn’t take long before new cracks appeared after each resurfacing. When I moved to Marietta, however, I thought my new neighborhood’s courts must be new because they didn’t have any cracks at all. As it turns out, the Homeowners Association sprang for Premier Courts, which have a “rubber, sponge-like” layer beneath the 3 coats of acrylic paint – which comprises the surface of a tennis court – such that cracking is all but a thing of the past. The flexible layer allows these paint layers to "coast" across the hard surface beneath instead of being subject to the cracking that occurs with the expansion and contraction caused by seasonal temperature changes. That’s the good news. The “bad” news is that the “sponge-like” layer retains water from rainfall and, as the courts age as ours have and seams in the paint appear, moisture comes up from beneath while one is playing (from the pressure of your weight on top of it), even days after it has rained. You start out playing on dry courts, but they become wet while you’re playing, especially in high traffic areas at the baseline etc. However, it doesn’t ever really get too wet (slick) to play or make the balls unplayable either.

The great news is that resurfacing these types of courts is less expensive than usual because there are no cracks to seal: whereas in my old Towne Lake neighborhood, it was upwards of $45,000 to redo our 3 courts, it’s going to cost “us” less than $10,000 to resurface all 4 Premier Courts here in Marietta! Of course, the initial installation of these types of courts was pretty expensive.

Now that the decision has been made to resurface the courts, I’m impatient for it to be done. Unfortunately “we” waited too long to decide that it needed to be done, and resurfacing can’t be done after November 1st here in Atlanta. So, we’ll have to suffer through one more season of ALTA before we’ll have new “to die for” tennis courts … and we’ve opted for the U.S. Open Blue color, which naturally costs a bit more;-)