Edwards Tennis Nets: You Don’t Hear About Them, Because They Work So Well
January 14th, 2013
When it comes to managing sports facilities, it’s a great day when certain topics don’t come up. If you operated softball diamonds for championship tournaments, you wouldn’t want to deal with complaints about the dimensions of the playing fields. At the end of the tournament, it’s your hope that no one ever brings the matter up, because no one ever gives praise for a properly configured field. In tennis it’s no different. If tennis nets, posts and the court surface are not within specifications, people will complain but if they are reliable no one notices or comments. It says a lot about the quality of Edwards tennis nets for example, that so many major tennis tournaments use them, yet most tennis fans never talk about them.
In a tournament where millions of dollars are at stake, the last thing you want is facility problems. One of the most recent examples of this happening was at the 2012 Madrid Open. The event, which traditionally used red clay surfaces, used blue clay in 2012 on a trial basis because the surface would make it easier for television viewers to see the ball. Complaints about the surface came from players including Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, who normally dominates on clay as demonstrated by his multiple French Open titles. Not wanting to have future problems and lose these elite stars for the 2013 Madrid Open, the ATP recently declared that the tournament would go back to using red clay surfaces.
Imagine what would happen if the Madrid Open had problems with tennis nets and other court equipment in addition to the clay issues. Not only would stars like Djokovic and Nadal threaten to sit out of future tournaments, they might be tempted to leave the ATP and form their own governing body. So much of the game of tennis is a game of inches, which is why challenges to in/out calls are allowed. If tennis nets were unreliable to the point that they often fell apart or drooped to the point that games were interrupted to fix them, everyone from the fans to the players to the organizers would suffer. Wimbledon, the US Open and other professional tournaments use reliable court equipment like tennis nets made by Edwards so they don’t have to deal with problems with court equipment staying within regulation and can instead deal with the normal issues that tournament management face.
The reliability of Edwards products goes beyond their tennis nets and posts and carries over to other sports. They also apply their 125 years of expertise to equipment for soccer, basketball, volleyball and field hockey. You will find that major events like the World Cup, European Championships and Beijing Olympics have used Edwards equipment. Many of their nets already are or can be made flame retardant to BS 5687 Part 2 Type B standards for indoor use.
Recently some of the governing bodies of professional sports have had controversial issues to deal with that challenge their credibility. ATP had to address the aforementioned problems with blue clay, while the NFL got a black eye from its use of replacement officials. Clearly these organizations have so much to deal with in the best of circumstances; the last thing they need is for field or court equipment to go south on them. The organizers of many elite sporting events from have spoken loudly by voting with their checkbooks. Whether they need goal posts or tennis nets, many of them choose to go with Edwards.
