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by Jake Cox
Section Editor
This coming spring, the North Sanpete School District will start construction on new tennis courts just west of the soccer field.
The new courts will replace the old ones that have been used for 25 years. This is one of many sports aprojects the district is pursuing right now.
“We’d been applying for grants for a while,” tennis coach Matt Braithwaite said. “The district wanted upgrades with the track and the football field, as well as looking at resurfacing the courts. The grants have kind of helped us a lot with costs.”
The original plan was to simply resurface the tennis courts, but the resurfacing of the courts turned into a much bigger project when a crew analyzed them. The crew found out that resurfacing the courts wouldn’t do much good, because of the base layer of cement.
“When we had an engineer come look at the courts about resurfacing, they found that the base layer of cement was severely cracked,” Superintendent Nan Ault said. “They said that if we were to resurface the courts, they would last maybe a year or a little longer so we decided to construct new tennis courts instead. We got an engineer report done, and we can now turn that report over to a tennis court company so that they can start excavation.”
The excavation will start once the weather permits, and the district has hopes that the new courts will be finished in the summer and ready for the next girls season.
“The tennis courts should be started as soon as the snow melts,” said NS athletic director Cheryl Hadley. “The district is hoping to have them done this coming summer or maybe done during the fall for the start of the girls tennis season. We just want them done as soon as possible for the tennis teams to play on.”
The new tennis court design includes adding an extra court. Where the old ones only have five, the new ones will have six and they will all be fenced in as well.
“We designed the courts so that they could just be in place,” Ault said. “The cost doesn’t include lights or anything, but we are going to add them eventually. We were originally planning to do an L shape plan for the courts, but the engineer said to do it in a bigger block and now it’s more stable and we can add on another court.”
After the new courts are completed, the district has decided that the old ones will be demolished, and used for another purpose.
“We haven’t decided what we’re going to do yet,” Ault said. “We have some ideas, but nothing has been decided on yet.”
Some of the ideas discussed would be to build an auto shop or add more parking.
“The district is hopeful to convert some of the old courts into new academic options for students,” Braithwaite said. “From what I’ve heard from the district is that we’re looking at an auto shop type class, which would be phenomenal for our district since we have a lot of students who do that type of work.”
