On Saturday mornings, dozens of eager tennis players descend on the courts at Elmira Avenue Park in East Durham for intense competition and lighthearted camaraderie, a tradition that dates back decades. Some players, like 86-year-old LaVerne Harper, have played at Elmira since it was built in 1978.
On one such recent day, Bruce Parker, another regular at Elmira, demonstrated Harper’s age and dedication to the game by pitching dirt between his fingers: “You see this stuff right here? He ain’t quite as old as that.”
When players aren’t hitting volleys across the net, they’re sending friendly barbs back and forth at each other about their performance on the courts. For hours, they sit in lawn chairs and gossip with snacks and refreshments in hand as they serve up stories about their lives in Durham.
“Every weekend is an event,” Harper said.
Most of the group is made up of older Black residents who adopted Elmira Avenue Park as their “home court,” after it was opened in the 1970s, when courts where Black players felt welcome were more limited. Nowadays, the eight courts at Elmira are well loved but increasingly difficult to play on, with gaping fissures and warped surfaces from water damage and poor drainage that make it more precarious for everyone, especially the older players, to navigate. The tennis courts at Elmira aren’t the only ones in need of a facelift, either.
Durham tennis players, spearheaded by the Eno Community Tennis Association (Eno CTA), have been advocating for updates to the city’s tennis courts for years, arguing that upgrades would not only benefit local players but also attract regional and national tournaments that bring in significant tax revenue for the host city.
Based on their advocacy, the Durham Parks and Recreation (DPR) is recommending $7 million to address a backlog of tennis court improvements. Local tennis lovers will find out if the projects are getting funded when a draft of the city’s upcoming budget is presented May 18.
“It is just so important to us that we continue to develop the community around [tennis],” said Adrianne Charleston, a regular at the Elmira Park tennis courts who spoke at a March public hearing alongside her 8-year-old son, Lightning.
“Every weekend, me and my mom go to Elmira Park to play tennis and hang out with our friends called the Old Man Crew,” Lightning said at the same hearing. “When we don’t play tennis, we sit under a tree and laugh, crack jokes, and talk each other’s heads off.”
A Growing Sport
Tennis has steadily grown in the Triangle area in recent years, according to the North Carolina chapter of the U.S. Tennis Association (USTA), the nonprofit which oversees the competition circuit throughout the country, culminating in its signature event, the U.S. Open Championship. Matches and tournaments are administered by local USTA chapters like Eno CTA—which took over administering USTA matches from DPR in 2024 and is the primary organizer for most of the recreational tennis in Durham. The results allow players to see how they stack up across other regions and players of all skill levels, including the likes of world-class professionals Coco Gauff and Naomi Osaka, though don’t expect to see them on a court in Durham anytime soon.
In 2015, 375 teams were participating in USTA’s five main leagues in Durham. Ten years later, that number had risen to 640 teams, encompassing more than 8,000 registered players. Since 2023 alone, Triangle-wide program registrations for leagues and events have increased by 9.7%. Durham has experienced the biggest growth in registration, 18.5%.
But dozens of Durham’s courts, including Elmira Avenue Park, haven’t been upgraded recently, even as demand rises. Facilities aren’t always fully functional—lights don’t work, nets are down, courts have cracks—which can cause scheduling issues when groups like Eno CTA are coordinating matches, said Eno CTA board president Mary Long, a longtime Durham resident who picked up tennis during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Zack Czajkowski, vice president of the Eno CTA, said the group will occasionally partner with private schools and tennis clubs to use their courts, but maintaining the network of public courts is the top priority.
“We’ve got great public court infrastructure,” Czajkowski said. “We’d love to get new courts built, but right now, people are just begging to get the lights fixed and the crater, if you will, squared away.”
Durham’s parks and recreation department manages 57 courts in total across 12 parks. All but two—Northgate Park and Oval Drive Park—have lights for folks to play into the evening hours. The city has made some recent investments in tennis infrastructure: Tennis courts at Southern Boundaries Park and Forest Hills Park were resurfaced in 2024, and in 2025, new outdoor lighting was installed at W.D. Hill Recreation Center. At the end of 2023, a dozen courts were built at Piney Wood Park exclusively for pickleball, a frenemy of tennis, and additional pickleball courts were added at Sherwood Park.
Money for court improvements has been included in the city’s Capital Improvement Plan, which lays out long-term infrastructure projects. But, according to DPR Business Services Analyst Emilie McIntosh, the extent of the repairs needed has historically been underestimated—and in turn underfunded—leading to a backlog.
“The city recognizes that we’ve had this money to resurface courts in the [Capital Improvement Plan] but haven’t always budgeted properly, and so we sort of end up not completing projects,” said Durham City Councilmember Carl Rist, an avid tennis player himself. “I think they realized, ‘We got a big backlog, we just need to do this all one year and get caught up.’”
A Deep History
Throughout the 20th century, segregation and racism kept Black players out of most tennis facilities, especially in the South. Long before two Black sisters from Compton, California, became the faces of tennis worldwide, Black players were barred from participating in the highest levels of competition. It wasn’t until 1950 that world-class tennis pro Althea Gibson broke the color barrier, becoming the first Black player to compete in the U.S. Open, later winning her first U.S. Open in 1957. A decade later, in 1968, tennis legend Arthur Ashe became the first Black male athlete to win the tournament.
During their rise, Gibson and Ashe would travel to Durham for tournaments at the Algonquin Tennis & Social Club—a Fayetteville Street facility (now the site of W.D. Hill Recreation Center) established in 1922 by Durham’s Black residents determined to have a space of their own for recreation, business and political meetings, and socializing. In 1935, this was where the group now known as the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People was formed.
Durham didn’t just play host to out-of-town talent. Hillside High School, an all-Black school at the time, mounted an impressive run of success in the 1950s and ’60s—both the men’s and women’s teams dominated high school tennis in North Carolina. Hillside’s boys’ team won eight straight state singles titles from 1953 to 1960, led by coach Carl “Bear” Easterling.
Among Hillside’s illustrious tennis alums: Irwin Holmes, who won the 1956 state singles title and doubles title (alongside a 16-year-old Harper), went on to become the team captain at North Carolina State University and the school’s first Black graduate. Joe Williams, winner of the 1960 state title, touts an impressive win over Ashe during their young careers. John Lucas II, son of titanic educator John Lucas, was an All-American tennis and basketball player at the University of Maryland after graduating from Hillside. And Bonnie Logan, a three-time girls’ singles champion from 1965 to 1967, became the first Black player to join the Virginia Slims professional women’s tour in 1971.
Harper remembers the humble beginnings from which he and the other Hillside standouts came. Each time they played at the Algonquin Tennis Club, they were responsible for rolling out the clay courts and relining its boundaries. Before they could afford tennis rackets, an engineering professor in the neighborhood made them wooden paddles. The kids would practice their forehands by hitting tennis balls against the back wall of the club.
Now an elder in the tennis community, Harper serves as a mentor and inspiration to young upstarts like Charleston and Lightning, who live in the neighborhood next to Elmira Avenue Park. Harper and others who play there have become a found family for the mother-son duo. Charleston and Lightning even received a coveted invitation to the 80th birthday party for Elmira Park’s most fashionable tennis player, Bernadette “Ms. Bernie” David-Yerumo.
Lightning first picked up a racket four years ago when Charleston signed him up for group lessons at the park. One of the other parents convinced Charleston to grab a racket, too. Lightning, a multisport athlete, enjoys playing tennis in part because of his mom’s newfound love for the sport. He said he wants his mom to keep getting better and can only beat her “when she’s very tired.”
For Charleston, involvement in tennis now expands far beyond Elmira Park. In 2022, she became the chair of the DEI committee for USTA NC, working with partners across the Southeast to make the sport more accessible, especially for Black colleges and universities.
Growing up, Charleston used to drive an hour and a half from her hometown of Granite Quarry to Durham and volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. She’s now turned her penchant for public service toward building a stronger, more diverse tennis community.
“In order to be able to offer suggestions, you need to have a seat at the table,” Charleston said.
A Call to Action
Based on feedback from players, DPR is proposing over $7 million in repairs and upgrades at six parks: Whippoorwill, Rock Quarry, Morreene Road, W.D. Hill, Garrett Road, and Elmira. Repairs include resurfacing and lighting, as well as tree pruning and drainage to support overall court stability.
While those courts are awaiting repairs, casual players have fewer options. They can book a court with surfacing issues, like Elmira, or if they’re lucky, find one in good condition that isn’t reserved by Eno CTA, which needs playable courts for official USTA events. Eno CTA spends about $60,000 annually on court rentals and lighting fees to host USTA-sanctioned tournaments and other events.
Public courts increase accessibility to the sport by offering more affordable fees than private courts and programs that help reduce the costs associated with equipment and lessons. A player’s essential needs are a decent racket and a good pair of tennis shoes, which most folks wear everyday (groups like Eno CTA and the Durham-Orange Community Tennis Association give away secondhand rackets to beginners, and the Try Tennis program from USTA NC offers $50 beginner clinics for children and adults).
“That’s why we need robust and open public courts, especially if there’s enough where you don’t have to reserve them, or don’t go through the city to pay that extra fee,” Czajkowski explained. “If you can just show up and walk on, it saves money, gives a little bit more access, and makes it more accessible broadly.”
Czajkowski and others are also quick to emphasize the health benefits of playing tennis, which one study says can add nearly 10 years to your life compared to a more sedentary lifestyle or even other sports like soccer. Harper and David-Yerumo, both in their 80s, point to the habit of weekly tennis as a major contributor to their quality of life, though Harper said he avoids playing against the young up-and-comers like Elmira’s rising 8-year-old tennis star, Lightning.
Players say improvements could also help Durham attract regional tournaments, which can bring in millions of dollars in court rental fees and sales tax revenue to host cities. Currently those events—and that money—is going to places like Raleigh and Cary.
In Wake County, the 24-acre Cary Tennis Park hosts 32 public courts, boasting electronic scoreboards and permanent seating at the park’s premier court. Construction began in 2002. Since then, the town of Cary has continued to invest in upgrades and new features that attract hundreds of thousands of visitors and allow Cary to host dozens of tournaments, bringing in $3 million in annual economic impact, according to the town of Cary’s website.
“Every meaningful city outside of Durham in North Carolina has the core capacity to do a state tournament and bring that revenue in,” Czajkowski said, calling out much smaller cities like Goldsboro and Hickory. “And so we are costing ourselves as a city money by not having a regular maintenance schedule, by not taking care of the courts.”
Whether Elmira Park receives the upgrades in this year’s budget that players asked for won’t deter Harper, Charleston, and others from returning to continue their weekly tradition.
“Twenty-seven million people in this country play tennis, and they’re not all members of country clubs,” Czajkowski said. “Most tennis in the United States is happening on public courts. And there’s a rich history, you know, from Arthur Ashe to Jimmy Connors to the Williams sisters. We can continue that legacy if we continue funding it and investing in tennis around the country, and specifically in Durham.”
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