Based on the latest information from the ACPS facilities department at last week’s school board meeting, don’t expect the new tennis courts to be ready for opening day in 2014. However, if winter weather cooperates, the T.C. Titans may have a true home court advantage sometime before the tennis season concludes. (The T.C. tennis team currently plays its home matches on courts in Fairfax County that are rented by ACPS.)
There will be at least one more community meeting this fall to present the plans, which will then need to be approved by the Planning Commission and the City Council in December. February is the earliest that the work would begin, and the work will take one to two months.
The tennis courts, which will be located along King Street in front of the parking garage, were approved a while back, and the funds to pay for them have been allocated. The project was delayed when the decision was made to add lights to the courts, which required new designs and new approvals. I’m told that there’s no way to proceed with the work on the courts while awaiting approval for the lights, and that the lights must be installed during construction of the courts themselves.
Meanwhile, the HVAC work at the closed Chinquapin facility is reportedly proceeding on schedule for the pool to be reopened on November 1, the start of the T.C. Swim and Dive season. Unfortunately, the work that’s underway has nothing to do with improvements to the pool, nor can it remedy the fact that the pool is not regulation length in either yards or meters. So at least for a few more years, the T.C. Swim and Dive team will continue hosting its home meets at rented facilities in Fairfax County. This fall, the city will be hiring a consulting firm to study the feasibility of building a 50-meter competition pool at Chinquapin, which the City Council included in the budget earlier this year.
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