University Discloses Plans For Indoor Tennis Courts

Another building will soon grace the Harvard skyline. The Department of Athletics announced yesterday the construction of an "all-weather indoor tennis facility" at Soldiers Field.

The $200,000 structure will hold three courts and will be ready by the Fall of 1963.

Both Faculty and students of the University will be able to use the courts in the "off-season" which runs roughly from October to April.

W. Palmer Dixon '25 is the benefactor; a former Harvard squash star, and one of the all-time greats, Dixon also sponsored the 1959 renovation of the University squash courts and the construction of the new galleries in Hemenway Gym in the Fall of 1960.

Why build indoor tennis courts? The wind blows mightily on the flat, exposed Soldiers Field area and makes an efficient practice difficult. Coach Jack Barnaby complains that "it's impossible to build up tennis players the way we do in squash. At present you can predict the outcome of the tennis league in the Fall: it's difficult for the coach to change anything."

The wind on Soldiers is so bad that last Spring it ripped to shreds several canvas screens hung on the fences of the courts. The trees that line one side of the area aren't much help, according to Barnaby.

The indoor courts will also be useful as places to continue matches broken up by rain. The Ivy tennis season is a short and tight one, and a match that is rained out often cannot be rescheduled.

The courts will have floors of "standard green," the same stuff that covers the present outdoor varsity courts. The indoor and outdoor floors will be the same in order that matches begun outside may be completed inside without disputes about a change of terrain. In fact, the new building is expected to stand in the space now occupied by the varsity's first four courts.

Finally, since all but two of the varsity netmen plays a winter sport, the new facility will be largely empty and open to the University community in the non-tennis months of the year.

Harvard will be first in the Ivy League to have such a facility. Choate, a prep school in New York State, has indoor courts, and Yale, a university in New Haven, has two makeshift canvas-covered courts in its gym.

Dixon, the donor, won the national squash championships in 1925 when he was a Harvard senior and again in 1926. He was a master of position squash, and in 1946, when badly out of practice, was still able to hold his own against one of the leading professional players of the day: Jack Barnaby.