Bringing tennis indoors
When the weather’s good, they scatter to tennis courts all around Pictou County.
But in the winter, when there’s only one place to play, they became like a little family.
“We get to spend the winter together,” says Shauna Coleman, after she and 11 others had finished playing two hours of tennis on Tuesday morning.
The lighting is a little gloomy inside the building, “but we’ve all gotten used to it,” Coleman adds.
Twice a week (10 a.m. until noon on Tuesday, and 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. on Thursday) they pay $12 each to play doubles on the synthetic surface at the William M. Sobey indoor Soccer Complex, with the tennis balls slightly deflated to account for the bounce on the turf. A couple of them even travel from Antigonish to play.
“What’s so nice about this is the schedule,” Coleman says. “We all know we’ve got to get here to play,” on certain days and times.
Victor Smith was one of the ones who helped get the Highland Tennis Association off the ground in Pictou, where new courts at Broidy Park were built a few years ago.
A Pictou County resident of around eight years, Smith had an ancestor arrive here on the ship Hector in 1773. They were named Munroe, but he doesn’t know their first names (according to the website shiphector.com, there were three people named Munroe on the Hector: Janet, Donald and John).
He says he wasn’t aware of his connection to the Hector connection until he moved here with his wife Linda (who died three years ago), after they had spent a few years sailing around South America.
In his spare time, Smith gives tennis lessons — and offers them free of charge — to a few adults in Pictou.
“I got my instructor’s certificate when I was 72,” says Smith, who recalls taking the tennis instructing course three years ago with a couple of people who appeared to be in their 40s, but “the rest were all 18 years old,” he says with a smile.
“It was a pretty intense program, but I wanted to put something back into the game.”
Coleman says anywhere from 10-20 tennis enthusiasts will show up at the indoor facility on a regular basis, but there’s always room for more, and no one gets left standing on the sidelines. “We’d love to have more people out here playing.”