Tennis in Lake Tahoe
By Roger Cox

You can find yourself playing in a mountaintop aerie with distant views of the lake, on a court right next to the water or one tucked away in the pine-scented woods.

Ten years ago, Susie Land and seven other women on her ladies 3.0 team in Santa Cruz, California, decided to spend a long summer weekend in Lake Tahoe playing tennis. “We thought it would be fun to go up and just work on our games,” she remembers. “It’s such a beautiful mountain area.” They’ve been coming ever since, joined now by husbands and other members of their tennis club.

For Bob Dreyer and his family, tennis is only part of what draws them from Santa Rosa, California, to Lake Tahoe in the summer. “My wife Mary and I take clinics in the morning and then pick up the kids for horseback riding, biking or an afternoon at King’s Beach,” he says of their routine. “There’s even a local company that puts on Shakespeare in a little amphitheater [at Sand Harbor State Park], so you can have wine and a picnic and watch a theater production.”

Mark Twain arrived before tennis had been invented, but he, too, fell under the spell of Lake Tahoe, calling it “fairest picture the whole earth affords.” Set at 6,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and girded by a luminous wall of granite peaks rising to over 10,000 feet, this deep crystal-clear pool extends for 22 miles on both sides of the California-Nevada border. There isn’t a larger alpine lake in the country.

Nowhere is this grand expanse more stunning than at Emerald Bay in the southwest corner. Highway 89 snakes around it, its two lanes chiseled into the granite slope perhaps a thousand feet above the emerald-green waters. Turnouts at places like Inspiration Point and Emerald Bay Lookout swarm with view-struck families, pointing fingers and cameras. Here and there, hiking trails zigzag steeply down to the shore, one of them ending at Vikingsholm, a 38-room replica of a Scandinavian-style castle open for guided tours.

Every visitor to Lake Tahoe—Mark Twain included—finds his or her way to Emerald Bay at least once, but it’s the abundant recreation that keeps them there for days or weeks at a time. The size of the lake makes it a popular with day sailors and people who take day cruises on ersatz paddlewheel steamers. Fisher-men drop lines for Mackinaw trout and Kokanee salmon (though Twain blamed his inability to catch trout on the clarity of the lake, which allowed fish to see the line, and thus, ignore the bait). Hikers, horseback riders and mountain bikers take off for the Tahoe Rim Trail, a 165-mile pathway along the ridgetops to points as high as 10,000 feet. Lovers of extraordinary houses visit Tallac, a 74-acre lakefront historic site that features three large and beautifully crafted turn-of-the-century estate homes as well as cabins, museums, working artists and concerts in the great hall of the Valhalla estate. Golfers, meanwhile, have a choice of some 15 links.

Since part of the lake lies in Nevada, the diversions also encompass casino gambling and the neon that goes with it. Not that you’d mistake it for Las Vegas’s Strip. There isn’t a volcano, Eiffel Tower, or Egyptian pyramid among them. The few gambling halls at the north end lie too far apart to make a collective impression, and the neon strip at the south end fizzles out within blocks of the state line.

Tennis, on the other hand, is spread all around the lake. Back in the heady days of the tennis boom, Billie Jean King and Dennis Van der Meer established one of their TennisAmerica camps on the north shore. Camps of various stripes have continued to take place at venues around the lake since then, including the 25-year-old NIKE junior camps at the Granlibakken Resort and Conference Center (www.ussportscamps.com) in Tahoe City. You can still find resorts with camps that can satisfy your craving for a three-to-five-hour daily tennis fix, as Land and Dreyer did. But if the members of your family want more, or you simply want time to enjoy everything else the lake has to offer, then the choice of options broadens considerably. And these are very appealing choices. You can find yourself playing in a mountaintop aerie with distant views of the lake, on a court right next to the water or one tucked away in the pine-scented woods.

In general, there’s more tennis activity at the north end than the south. If you’re bent on staying in South Lake Tahoe however, your best bet is The Ridge Tahoe (www.ridge-tahoe.com), a ridge-top hotel and condo resort and spa in Stateline, Nevada. Its modest four-court complex includes the only indoor court in the region, and it reaches out to tennis players by providing free court time and a full-time pro, who offers lessons, adult and junior clinics, and weekly mixers.

For sheer scenic beauty, head for Squaw Valley USA (www.squaw.com/summer_index.html), the fabled site of the 1960 Winter Olympics, and a trip up the cable car to High Camp, a panoramic recreation complex set at 8,200 feet. There, you’ll find a swimming pool large enough to justifiably be dubbed a “Lagoon” as well as an ice skating rink, Olympic museum, café, and half a dozen hard courts, though only two had nets when I visited last summer. Playing at this altitude is a challenge, but the views of the mountains and lake are worth it.

Another reason to consider Squaw as a base is the brand-new Village at Squaw Valley USA (www.thevillageatsquaw.com). Built by Intrawest, this sinuous collection of shops, restaurants, handsomely-appointed condos frames a cobblestone pedestrian mall that runs right up to the tram house. It’s also the setting for occasional summer festivals—a beer celebration when I visited last August. Numerous hiking trails lead into the mountains, and there is a gentle bike path along the Truckee River all the way to Lake Tahoe. Squaw Valley’s other summer assets include horseback riding stables and a golf course, the latter connected to the Resort at Squaw Creek (www.squawcreek.com), which also has a spa and two professionally staffed hard courts, free to guests.

Yet another new village is taking shape at Northstar-at-Tahoe (www.northstarattahoe.com/info/summer). If you’ve been to Northstar, you know that there has always been a modest village at the core of this 2,500-acre resort, 6 miles north of Lake Tahoe. But whole sections of that village have been razed and the rest is being thoroughly transformed. Plans call for luxury condominiums, boutiques, outdoor cafes and an ice skating rink—all designed to create a true gathering place, summer and winter, day and night.

When complete at the end of 2005, this new village will add the immeasurably to the appeal of what was already the premier tennis destination in Lake Tahoe. This is where Land and Dreyer, both league players, opted to vacation because the 10-court complex in the trees behind a lively recreation center has the most extensive menu of activities in the region. Tennis director Zeke Straw brings an almost palpable enthusiasm to these programs, which include adult camps lasting from three to five hours a day, camps and clinics for juniors of all levels, weekly social gatherings like margarita mixers and barbecues, and occasional tournaments, among them the Northstar Open over Labor Day weekend that gets 400 entrants. “I lived for tennis,” says Straw of his growing up in New Hampshire. His love of the game is infectious.

Those 10 courts snared a prime location, just steps from the village and even closer to vast swimming pool, kiddie pools, adults-only lap pool, outdoor spas, a playground, a well-equipped fitness center, a snack bar and more. With construction going on in the village this summer, the rec center and courts are the focal point for daytime activity. Sooner or later, it seems, nearly every guest ends up there. There is, however, no shortage of other activities at the resort, including 100 miles of mountain bike trails, an 18-hole golf course, a climbing wall, horseback riding stables, fly fishing in a secluded reservoir, and more. No wonder families—and league players—love it.

Down at Chinquapin (www.chinquapin.com), the action is more low key, although there, too, the main complex of six hard courts adjoins a swimming pool in a wooded setting. But rather than being situated in the mountains, this 95-acre collection of one- to four-bedroom condos and townhomes hugs a mile of private lakefront, three miles from Tahoe City. Narrow rocky beaches line part of the property, which also has two private piers, moorings for boats, and a seventh tennis court, this last right next to the water. “Down there,” says tennis director Greg Felich, “if you hit a good kick serve, the ball will wind up in the water.”

Felich has run this operation for decades, long enough to have developed a loyal following. There are a couple of clinics and round robins each week at the main court complex, a modest pro shop, a sign-up board for those looking for games and a few special five-day summer camps (running 90 minutes/day for adults and one hour/day for juniors) on selected dates.

There’s another solid program at Tahoe Donner (www.tahoedonner.com), which ranks as the second-largest recreational community in all of California. Located in upper Truckee, 20 miles north of Lake Tahoe, this 6,000-acre development comprises more than 4,600 homes and a wealth of amenities, including a very active 11-court tennis complex, a golf course, an equestrian center, a fitness center, several swimming pools and a marina on Donner Lake, 5 miles away, with a beach club and watersports rentals.

Although no pro has been hired for this summer as this goes to press, the resort has long had an active tennis calendar. Every week there are several different types of adult clinics, junior development and pee-wee clinics and a very popular ladies day. Those are supplemented by a couple of social round robins each month and periodic tournaments, capped off by the 20th Annual Tahoe Donner International Wheelchair Tennis Tournament, in October. To stay there as a guest, you rent not through Tahoe Donner itself, but through individual owners or their chosen realtors. To find them, Google “Tahoe Donner.”

There are several other resorts with courts and pros—the six-court Tahoe Tavern (www.tahoeproperties.com) chief among them—but you don’t need to stay at a property with courts to indulge your passion for tennis. The Incline Village Tennis Complex (http://www.ivgid.org/newsite/Recreation /tennis.htm), which won a National Facility Award from the USTA, is a winsome 11-court public club tucked into the pines in Incline Village on the east side of the lake. Former satellite pro Bill Fallon, who runs it, has been teaching tennis around the lake for three decades, starting with the TennisAmerica camps. The club runs some kind of organized adult and junior activity every day but Sunday, including a very popular Monday night mixed doubles and barbecue, that routinely fills to its capacity of 28 players.

For Dreyer, tennis in Lake Tahoe came as a revelation. “I discovered that there was life in Tahoe outside of winter.” It also became habit forming. “Two years ago we went for a weekend,” he remembers. “Last year we spent five days. This year we hope to make it a week.” It could have that effect on you, too.