SFHS teams finally have their home back
Courts were finally resurfaced last year, and despite new cracks after $240,000 project, boys, girls teams are off to strong starts this season
No more drives from one campus to another. No more worries about car accidents and latearriving tennis players for Bonnie Rogers.
Oh, and no more weeds wiggling their way through the cracks on the surface of Santa Fe High’s tennis courts — for now at least.
For the first time in four seasons, Santa Fe High has a home, and it’s on its own campus. A resurfacing project approved by the Santa Fe Public Schools board in August assured the tennis program would play at the school’s tennis complex for the first time since 2013. The Demons and Demonettes spent the previous three seasons nomadically wondering the city practice and matches as players shuttled from the Shellaberger Tennis Complex, Herb Martinez Park and Capital.
Capital was the primary place for practices and matches last season, but Santa Fe High had only
four courts to use for practice.
It wasn’t until mid-February that Santa Fe High could finally use the complex on the northwest corner of the campus, but it has been a
permanent home since then. That is much to the relief of Rogers, the second-year head coach of the program.
“It’s so easy now to have practice over there compared to driving to Capital High School,” Rogers said. “I had a big fear of the kids driving there from Santa Fe High. I was concerned that anything could happen. Plus some of the kids were taking other players in their own car.”
Junior Lily Farr added that the headaches of driving from one campus to the other are not missed.
“The traffic was horrible because it was right after schools hours and you didn’t want to bother your parents asking if someone was going out,” Farr said.
The challenge now is for players to dress for practice and walk to the tennis courts, which usually takes about 20 to 30 minutes for everybody to appear. Even though the resurfacing happened late in the summer of 2016, cracks reappeared already — but they are manageable than the ones players had to navigate for a few years.
Rogers recalled 4-inch to -5-inch wide cracks with weeds grow-
ing through them because there was no maintenance of the courts. It led then-head coach Bill Ellsworth to use Shellaberger for practice while holding matches at Capital in 2014. Rogers said the warranty on the current resurfacing could cover the costs of repairing the new cracks.
“If they can do annual maintenance, [the courts] will be good,” Rogers said.
With a relatively young boys team and a more seasoned girls squad, Rogers hopes the new/old home will help the players’ development. That was an issue over the past few seasons because having limited court space put a crimp in the development of some players, especially inexperienced ones.
Sophomore Andres Sanchez said challenge matches, in which a players could competed against a teammate for the spot in the singles or doubles lineup, had to be scheduled to free up a court for it to happen. Having just four courts for practice also meant several players on one court, which limited the amount of time they could work on their shots and serves.
“It wasn’t very good,” Sanchez said. “The seniors are trying to get better, and everyone else is, too, but with a minimal amount of courts, it was hard to separate us and do that.”
Despite those challenges, the boys team won four district titles in a five-year stretch, including last spring. It was the first team district title for the school since moving up to 6A in 2014. This year, the girls have stepped into the role of contenders, as they are 4-0 in dual action and took third in the Roswell Goddard Invitational in February. The boys team lost five seniors to graduation, and Sanchez leads a sophomore-dominant group.
However, Sanchez feels having more courts is helping some of the inexperienced teammates grow more quickly. He pointed to the Demons’ first true home match in five years against Española Valley, won by the Sundevils 6-3, as a wake-up call for some players.
“I think we got more serious about the game,” Sanchez said. “Individually, we’ve been more confident with each other.”
Even with a permanent home, the players and Rogers know the resurfacing was merely a Band-Aid for a long-suffering wound. The courts have gone through resurfacing four times over the past 20 years, and each project led to a shorter shelf life.
Sanchez said prairie dogs tunneling under the courts are a big reason for the constant cracking and recracking of the surfaces. On Friday, a New Mexican reporter witnessed one of those furry creatures racing into a hole about 40 yards from the complex.
The current patch job, which cost $240,000, has a two-year warranty, but the district does not expect to address the larger issue of either rebuilding the courts or moving them to another spot on campus for at least the next few years. Farr remembers when she was an eighth-grader and lobbied the school board to build a new facility in 2014, believing that another resurfacing job would not fix the problems.
Farr still holds out hope that her younger teammates will realize her dream and play on new courts.
“I only have one more year after this,” Farr said. “They should make it a priority for the other players so they can experience what I wanted to experience. They deserve it. They worked their butts off and should be able to play on some really nice courts.”