When Frederick High School sophomore Josiah Brittenham first began training with the coaches at the Rocky Mountain Tennis Center four years ago, he held aspirations of playing tennis collegiately.
RMTC proved just the right fit for a family with four kids that also fosters other children on a teacher’s salary, and Brittenham has seen his game improve to the point that he’s able to play No. 1 singles for the Golden Eagles in just his second year.
Brittenham’s father, James, believes that the facility has been a great asset not just for his son, but for Boulder at large. The owners at RMTC have helped out with scholarships for Josiah, so that he can continue to play the sport he loves without the financial burden.
“Tennis programs can just be super, super expensive, and (RMTC) is very reasonable. They just are the best bang for your buck,” James Brittenham said. “I’m a P.E. teacher at Foothill Elementary, and a lot of his coaches have come and helped me teach tennis during P.E. class, so it has been huge for the community as well.”
Now, the Brittenhams drive into Boulder three days a week for training, but they may have to find an alternative by the end of 2024, with RMTC set to be replaced by an incoming student housing project.
“In actuality, it’s the communities that we’re losing: the competitive community out at CU South and the camps,” said Kendall Chitambar, an owner at RMTC, which will be demolished in May. “It’s really hard to imagine the feeling in the community: the goodwill, the yelling, the crying, the laughing, the joy. I can’t tell you how many thousands of trophies I gave out there. I can’t tell you how many thousands of trophy presentations that I personally made, and I know a bunch of other tournaments did there as well.”
To offset some of the loss, Chitambar and his wife, Donna, have submitted a highly-contested application to the county to build a tennis facility on 79th Street near Lookout Road in Gunbarrel. Opponents, however, believe the special use application will alter the landscape and development of an area surrounded by thousands of acres of open space.
Tennis Center of the Rockies
Space to play tennis has become a premium in Boulder, a city that houses roughly 8,700 tennis players, according to a study commissioned by the United States Tennis Association and released by Kinetica in November.
The housing project will remove RMTC’s 15 courts, as well as CU South’s 12.
“We talk a lot about this one-third of tennis courts going away, you know, 27 courts going away,” Chitambar said. “For a city like Boulder, that’s massive.”
He noted that this project, dubbed the “Tennis Center of the Rockies,” would be able to serve tennis players of all ages and abilities, from able-bodied adults to wheelchair tennis aficionados, local pros, youth players and even the CU women’s team. It will be structured as a membership club that will also be open to the public.
The Brittenhams, having fully experienced the benefits that RMTC has offered the community, hope the county approves the project so that Josiah can continue reaching toward his dream. They don’t know where they’ll be able to send Josiah if RMTC isn’t replaced.
“Personally, I’m pretty sad that they’re closing this facility because I’ve been there so long,” Josiah said. “It’ll be a fresh start, and I think it’ll be good to see what else they can do. I’ll still try, for sure, to go to the program.”
The opposition’s most ardent worry with the project circulates around what approval of such a special use review would entail for rural Boulder County at large. They believe it would set a precedent that violates the Boulder County Comprehensive Plan that states that “growth should be channeled to municipalities, agricultural lands should be protected and reservation of our environmental and natural resources should be a high priority in making land use decisions.”
“My concern would be if the county approved this development, then they would not have a leg to stand on to deny very many other applications for very many other uses,” said Gregory Dobbin, who has lived in neighboring Gunbarrel Estates for the past 23 years. “There would potentially be a whole bunch of people who could go to the county and say, ‘Yeah, I want to build this on this place. And look what you did with this tennis center.’ You don’t have a reasonable argument to turn down my application. I object to this proposal on its own terms, but I also think if it were approved, it could create a very slippery slope to all kinds of other development.”
The applicants, along with Coburn Development, would create a six-court, outdoor-only facility for the CU women’s team, along with a small viewing structure that would accommodate 50 to 200 spectators; 12 indoor courts under two seasonal, bubbled structures for all-weather play; four youth courts about two-thirds the size of the adult courts; four kids courts about one-quarter the size of adult courts; a small kids clubhouse; and a pool with an attached clubhouse.
The Chitambars, in partnership with over 40 local investors, acquired the $1.75 million plot of land on Thursday morning.
Currently, the 19.73-acre private property in question is zoned as agriculture and borders a conservation area and grassland preserve.
The total estimated cost to buy the land and build the facility ranges from $12 million to $13 million, which Coburn and the RMTC owners are fundraising for through an online petition at change.org/p/approval-construction-of-new-tennis-facility-in-boulder-colorado. They already have collected 1,506 signatures in support of the Tennis Center of the Rockies.
Chitambar’s previous two proposals with the county, submitted separately in 2008 and 2012, fell through due to the 2008 recession and subsequent hesitation from investors in the years that followed.
Michael Xu, the president of the Boulder Tennis Association, said the loss of RMTC and CU South will send hundreds of current members who can’t afford the fees of private clubs in search of courts outside of the county.
“We’ve got people who are older seniors. We have people who are beginners, like 3- to 5-year-olds, the pros to wheelchair tennis players,” Xu said. “We’ve done a lot of community outreach about what people are experiencing, and some people are thinking about moving away. Some people are thinking about spending their winters somewhere else. Some people are looking at their entire friend group and just wondering, what are we going to do next winter, right? People like to play tennis, and when they do, it’s a couple times a week. If you can’t do what you love to do a couple of times a week, it’s going to be pretty tough.”
Mark Grassman, 76, a longtime member of RMTC, contracted transverse myelitis — an inflammation of part of the spinal cord — that confined him to a wheelchair four and a half years ago and disrupted his very active lifestyle.
When he called Chitambar, his old coach, he discovered that the tennis facility he called home for 30 years offered a program that could accommodate his new lifestyle.
“Kendall was a coach for me even before I got ill, but then I called him and asked him about it,” Grassman said. “I took some lessons with him and for a while there, I wasn’t going to get to play. But now, I’ve been very involved, playing twice a week, and I’ve met probably two dozen new friends and people that I’ve never met before.”
Grassman said the adaptive version of the sport proved vital to his physical and emotional recovery.
“It’s meant a lot to me that I can go out and get physical exercise and continue to enjoy the game that I’ve been playing for a long time,” he said.
But now, Grassman will have to find another place to play and may have to drive as far away as the APEX Center in Arvada.
“I’ll probably have to find a place on public courts, but I think it will be a little more awkward in the sense of accessibility,” Grassman said. “There are no other places that play in the wintertime indoors except for the Meadows and Boulder Country Club. They have indoor courts in the winter, but there are no other places publicly. That’s why I’m just really excited and really supportive of Kendall’s efforts now to try and get a new place started.
“Some of the public courts are hard to get into for wheelchair players. Accessibility isn’t great because of the equipment you need. You need to bring your tennis wheelchair. Some of the courts, they may have gates and stuff that are wide enough to get through, but they don’t necessarily have sidewalks and things to roll up to.”
‘It’s just not the right location’
Residents in the surrounding area, from those living in Gunbarrel Estates to the property next door, aren’t as thrilled with the proposal for such a large facility.
Their concerns, highlighted atstop79thsttenniscomplex.org, range from increased traffic and disruption to the native wildlife. They’ve received 1,267 signatures in opposition to the project.
“I think part of why I like living here, and I’ve lived here for such a long time, is that because of the rural sort of (environment) that we get in this neighborhood, it’s fairly quiet,” Dobbin said. “We don’t have streetlights in our neighborhood, so it’s dark. It’s quiet. We live on a very quiet street in a quiet neighborhood. In the summer, I sleep with my windows open all the time and I listen to the birds and the wildlife. … The lifestyle that I have cultivated and enjoyed, living in this house for more than 20 years, would be considerably impacted. That’s very personal.”
Joyce Frailey, a member of the Concerned Citizens of Gunbarrel and treasurer for the Gunbarrel Estates homeowner’s association, voiced distress over the surrounding area, which is home to burrowing owls and prairie dogs.
“There’s so much environmentally going on in that area, in addition to it being appropriate for a residential property, that it’s just not the right location,” said Frailey, a 20-year resident of Gunbarrel.
Kevin Schneider lives directly north of the property, and laments the added traffic and noise the tennis facility would create for him personally on an already busy road.
“I don’t want to be looking out my front window, a few hundred feet south of me, at two big domes for the fall, winter and spring of the year,” he said. “I don’t want to necessarily be listening to tennis competitions, whacking the ball and conversations constantly … taking place.”
The applicants have not settled on a lighting structure for the facility yet, and are planning on hosting outdoor hours from sunrise to sunset, varied by season. A third-party traffic study, commissioned by the applicants, found that site traffic will “continue to operate at overall acceptable levels of service,” and that “queues (will) remain within their respective storage lengths.”
Chitambar said a “phase two” project — which would have added 30 courts, including clay and pickleball courts — “is essentially dead,” to mitigate the concerns of residents surrounding noise and environmental impacts.
Opponents have suggested the facility be built at Tom Watson Park near the current IBM site off of Colo. 52, but Chitambar already inquired into and deemed that property unfeasible. Tom Watson Park is already under the purview of Boulder Parks and Recreation on a lease from IBM, meaning that the city doesn’t have a right to sell the land.
“Our tennis players need recreation now. As a small and nimble entity, it was easier for us to maneuver and try to find a way forward on our own,” Chitambar said. “We understand that we’re going to be changing traffic patterns out there, but our goal is to be good neighbors. Ideally, we provide a resource for the community, not an eyesore and not a hardship for them.”
Chitambar submitted the final application on Tuesday morning.
The county will send out a referral — a notification to property owners within a 1,500-foot radius of the subject property — and a referral packet to other agencies, including other county departments and any local, state and federal groups that may be connected to the land in question.
The referral period will last 35 calendar days before being scheduled for the next available planning commission hearing, which is held once a month.
From there, county planner Sam Walker estimated that the planning commission would take two months to consider the proposal before scheduling a board of county commissioners hearing, which will typically happen a month or two after the planning commission.
By the numbers:
Lot size: 19.73 acres (859,628 square feet)
Clubhouse: 7,552 total square feet (3,123 square feet on first floor)
Seasonal domes: Height of 53 feet, 1 inch from lowest point of property; 55,482 square feet each
Traffic impact: 99 new weekday vehicle trips during peak hours, 720 new weekday daily trips
