MY BIZ: Indoor tennis club reopens, adds pickleball

CEDAR RAPIDS — It took almost two years and $1 million, but the indoor tennis club severely damaged in the August 2020 derecho has reopened — with pickleball courts added.

“Pickleball is growing exponentially,” said Rusty Graff, manager of the Smithfield Tennis and Pickleball Center in southwest Cedar Rapids. “I’ve never seen anything like it, even in the heyday of tennis in the ’70s and ’80s. It’s different.”

Graff, a career tennis coach and instructor, admits it took some convincing to add the newish sport to the facility.

“As a tennis club, we wanted to stay in our lane as experts in tennis, so we kind of shied away from pickleball,” he said. “With the combination of the pandemic and the derecho, it kind of became a tsunami for pickleball in Eastern Iowa.”

Formerly Westfield Tennis Center, founded in 1976 by Chuck Schillig, the facility’s new name reflects both its new owner and focus.

As Westfield, the facility was just recovering from its COVID-forced shutdown when the August 2020 derecho blew one end off the 41,000-square-foot building.

“We were closed down for about three months,” Graff said. “It was doing pretty well through the summer months, and then the storm hit.”

Working through the insurance claim and locating contractors took more than 18 months.

“By that time, all the members had dissipated to other locations, so (Schillig) took care of the insurance and put it up for sale as-is,” Graff said.

Duane and Laura Smith bought the facility in September 2021, retaining Graff and his wife, Kathy Anderl, to manage the facility and manage what is now a 15-member staff. It took another year of work before what’s now Smithfield Tennis and Pickleball Center reopened last October.

“He had the vision,” Anderl said of Smith. “He thought the community needed indoor tennis and indoor pickleball.”

Membership soars

Tennis players returned, attracted by the new owners’ decision to reset dues to 2001 rates.

“Their options were to join a country club for $10,000 a year or drive to Iowa City,” Graff said.

Meanwhile, Graff and Anderl oversaw the conversion of two of the facility’s six tennis courts into four pickleball courts, with free membership, at least for now, where players pay for court time.

Club membership grew from about 300 tennis players in 2020 to about 1,300 today, with about 60 percent there for pickleball.

Invented in Washington State in the mid-1960s as a low-impact combination of tennis and badminton, pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in the U.S. The Association of Pickleball Professionals estimates 36.5 million Americans had played the game in the year ending August 2022, compared to about 5 million the previous year.

Smithfield hosts pickleball instruction and organized league play. Players of both sports can book court time online or through a smartphone app.

Graff noted that on one recent weekend, only 12 to 15 hours — out of 120 hours — were available for the courts. “That’s becoming pretty standard.”

“Older tennis players will quit playing tennis but now they can do this and make friends,” Anderl said. “It’s very social. I’ve been out on the pickleball court where you had an 80-year-old and a 14-year-old, grandparents and grandkids and families.”

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