“Well, just like parking lots, asphalt tennis courts need repairing. If you walked around these courts a week ago, you would have seen a lot of cracks and things that needed to be fixed. We had enough money in our maintenance fund to fix them up this year, so we decided to fix them up! The Janet Jopke Courts at Shaw Park are the only place people can really play tennis in Bay City, so it's used a lot. These courts are open to the public 24/7—anybody can come and play anytime, free of charge.
We also have a collaborative effort with the Dow Bay Area Family YMCA. They register and market tennis lessons for all ages, spring, fall, and summer. We also have a collaboration with the Boys and Girls Club. They come here every Wednesday morning for two hours in the summer to play tennis. We offer a number of USTA programs, Monday night social, Wednesday night social for adults, Tuesday night for high school kids.
So these courts get a lot of use and are important to this community. This $85,000 repair and resurfacing should be done this week, and the funds are provided due to various projects of the Bay Community Tennis Association along with grants from a variety of sources, including SC Johnson and the United States Tennis Association.”
—Joe Ricard, President of the Bay Community Tennis Association, Bay City
“The Janet Jopke Courts at Shaw Park are on Bay City school property, so they serve as the home courts for Bay City Central boys and girls tennis teams.
But the community gets to use these too. I've been playing tennis since I was a little kid, and the courts I grew up on are all gone, so this is a gem for the community. Other than when Central has practice or matches, they are open to the public.
We’re towards the end of a repair and resurfacing to the courts that started a couple of weeks ago. We were pretty aggressive with our fundraising to get the funding we needed, and specifically received a grant from SC Johnson.
It feels awesome to get to this point. We have great community support and a great board that works their tails off raising money and getting people excited about tennis is Bay City, so it’s. Exciting to have essentially brand new tennis courts.”
—Jane Klawon, Bay Community Tennis Association, Bay City
"First, we are filling all of the cracks on the courts and we are putting armor on them. Armor is a four-step bandaid: you put down a strip of tape after you have filled the cracks with cement. You put a piece of fabric over that and once that dries you put another piece of fabric over that and then you border it, so at the end of the crack itself, the repair will be about three feet wide and it will be nice and flush to the courts. Then we’ll take our acrylic resurfacer and put two coats of that over top of the armor and then start the painting process.
We will repaint the whole court. We start with a coat of black resurfacer and then go to the play areas after we have marked out the lines, measure them and mark them out. We will put two coats of the blue paint on the play areas and then once that is done we will do two coats of the green in the alleyways and around the borders. We will tape out all of our lines and then put down what is called line prime down—it’s almost like Elmer's glue. You just roll that on there and that prevents our white paint from bleeding underneath of the tape. That keeps the lines nice and sharp and there won't be any chatter marks on the edges of them."
The paint requires 48 hours to cure and then people are welcome to come and enjoy their new courts."
—Zach Anton, Pro Surfaces
“The Janet Jopke courts at Shaw Park have things that a lot of courts don’t have, making it even more useful to the community. There’s a hitting wall which you don’t see a lot anymore, and that allows people to come down and practice even if they don’t have someone to play with.
There’s a vinyl covered fence, which non-tennis people don't appreciate, but the ball doesn't bounce back onto the court like it would if it didn’t have the vinyl.
We’ve seen a lot of the comments on social media saying, ‘Thank you for maintaining these tennis courts.’ We think that the community appreciates what we're doing. Even if they don't play tennis, they can appreciate people taking care of something that's important to others.
We’re hoping the repair and resurfacing work will be completed this week, turning these courts into essentially brand new tennis courts for the community.”
—Joe Ricard and Jane Klawon, Bay Community Tennis Association, Bay City
