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With the sun high in the May sky, you may have forgotten the winter and spring squalls that ruined the Portland Interscholastic League tennis season.
Creppé Somsiri hasn’t.
A Lincoln High School junior, Somsiri plays tennis on the girls junior varsity team. Or tries to. Rain wreaks havoc each time Lincoln has a match.
During the PIL tennis season, matches are often canceled by another Oregon downpour, which makes the courts too slippery to play on. Between March 11 and April 10 in Portland, rain fell on 22 of the 31 days.
At Lincoln, every single preseason and league match was rained out for weeks on end. Only the league matches were rescheduled. Players throughout the city are asking, “How can we have a tennis season if there is no tennis?”
“We have gotten rained out every match this year so far,” Somsiri said in late April. “Our practices can also get canceled even if it wasn’t raining in the moment but earlier that day.”
So many matches needed to be rescheduled, Somsiri added, that the team was forced to play almost every day in early May so that results were in before the district and state tournaments, which started May 7. That took quite a toll on PIL athletes who are preparing for both International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement tests.
“As time goes by and games keep getting canceled after our early release from school, it just means that we leave school for no reason,” Somsiri said. “I don’t get to be in classes that I should be in, and I miss some tests and other assignments for no reason. It’s just really, really stressful. Senior varsity players sometimes can’t attend those district matches because they have IB testing. It’s very frustrating for everyone.”
Not all is lost, however, for Portland’s disheartened young tennis players. Many in the PIL believe the way to salvage high school tennis is to move the season to the fall, when Oregon weather is often at its best and the tennis courts are dry.
Somsiri agrees that reclassifying tennis as a fall sport statewide would be “a huge deal.” But she doesn’t know how the PIL can continue to deal with the endless rainouts in spring tennis.
John Carolan, the boys varsity tennis coach at Grant High School, agrees.
“We could expand opportunities if [the Oregon School Activities Association] would move either the boys or the girls tennis to the fall season,” Carolan says. “If only one gender were using the courts each season, we would have more court space and could expand the opportunities for players on both the boys’ and girls’ sides.”
A more costly option for the PIL is adding more indoor tennis court bubbles. The city currently sports only one public indoor tennis facility, the Portland Tennis Center. Opened in 1973 in the Kerns neighborhood, the center has eight indoor and four outdoor courts. Although most of those courts are crowded and constantly booked up, the city hasn’t found cause to fund additional indoor courts in 52 years.
That’s why players, coaches, parents and the rest of the prep tennis community are asking this: Will the PIL support high school tennis by moving the season or investing in covered courts? Or will the league and the district continue to leave its best athletes standing out in the rain?
WW put those questions to Portland Public Schools, seeking comment. As of press deadline, the district had not responded.
Gwenie Lee is a junior at Lincoln High School, covering Portland Interscholastic League sports from a student perspective. This story is part of a new initiative by WW to develop young voices in journalism.