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Thunder Bay’s new indoor tennis dome is open for business.<\/p>\n
The Thunder Bay Community Tennis Centre opened the $5 million Rogers Tennis Dome at Chapples Park to the public on Friday, said office manager Marco Maddalena.<\/p>\n
It includes six indoor courts \u2014 one of which can be converted into four pickleball courts \u2014 and is located next to the centre’s existing outdoor courts.<\/p>\n
“We’ll be a 15-court facility come this summer, and then in the winter we’ll just drop back down to six indoor courts,” Maddalena said. “It’s been busy, a lot of demand.”<\/p>\n
“A lot of people really want to get in and start playing,” he said. “They’ve been waiting so long and we’re just happy that we can get them in here.”<\/p>\n
Maddalena said the centre hopes the new dome will allow it to host larger events.<\/p>\n
Thunder Bay has been without a place to play tennis in the winter since the Confederation College bubble collapsed in 2019, and was subsequently closed.<\/p>\n
“It’s just amazing to see that we finally did it,” said Gail McGregor, who was playing on one of the dome’s new courts on Tuesday afternoon. “I think it’s great. It’s such a busy club during the summer and so to continue that in through the winter, everybody’s just so happy.”<\/p>\n
That was echoed by fellow player Deborah Rosnow, who said she’s been playing tennis for 24 years.<\/p>\n
“This is wonderful,” she said. “It’s been a 10 year project and we’re very excited.”<\/p>\n
“It was a long time coming and a lot of hard work, but we’ve done it and everybody is thrilled.”<\/p>\n
Rosnow said the dome offers plenty of opportunities.<\/p>\n
“The opportunity for year-round fitness for people,” she said, adding that the dome will also help with the development of junior players.<\/p>\n
“They haven’t been able to be competitive out of town,” Rosnow said. “If they’re in southern Ontario … they’re playing against people that do play year-round, so we’re really hoping that we’ll see some of our juniors in some top-level tournaments in Canada.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 2 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":529087,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-529086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529086\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/529087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}