Thanks to New Technology, the Open is Finally Ready for Rain
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A year after players, fans, and armies of towel-toting boys and girls did battle with four days of foul weather, officials at the U.S. Open are turning to some new technology to dry the courts faster and keep the tournament moving between showers.
Things had been going smoothly enough last year until the second week, when Flushing was beset by rain, fog, and incessant humidity. Another day of rain might even have pushed the 2003 tournament back to Monday for the first time since 1987.As everyone waited, cries rang out for tarps and roofs.
After a year studying its facilities and the effects of water on the U.S. Open courts, however, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) has determined that tarps are not the answer. In Arthur Ashe stadium, the wind is likely to make them billow, allowing water to seep underneath and into the slightly permeable surface, meaning the courts would have to be dried anyway. That, coupled with the time it would take to remove a covering without sloshing any water around, make tarps an inefficient answer, officials says.
Instead, the USTA, with the advice of scientists and others on a court-drying panel formed days after last year’s Open, has decided to put a new, Zamboni-like machine to the test.
The court drier, which has no official name, looks like a riding lawnmower and was created by a company in Minnesota that builds machines to scrub hospital floors. It sucks up water while simultaneously drying the courts with a squeegee. The machine runs on battery power and isn’t capable of making sharp turns (to avoid marking the court).
In all, officials expect the machines to reduce drying time by 10 minutes. At first glance, this might not seem like a lot, but it’s a 29% reduction from the Open’s previous estimated drying time of 35 minutes.
Chris Widmaier, the USTA’s senior director of public relations, said the court driers were tested every day for two months, for at least two hours a day. In the end, the USTA purchased 24 of the riding driers and 14 smaller ones that can be pushed – enough to tackle seven courts at once.
The riding machines will operate on the larger show courts in Arthur Ashe, Louis Armstrong, and the Grandstand. That will leave more people to towel the outer courts if need be.
Other steps have been taken to make the rain less of a nuisance. The USTA often resurfaces its courts, and over the years layers of the surface, DecoTurf II, have built up. The past year’s study revealed that those extra layers caused the courts to retain more moisture and dry more slowly.
This year, the excess was peeled off and a slightly modified version of the surface was applied. The new top coat is supposed to repel water and dry more quickly. The USTA has applied it to every court that needed resurfacing.
In the future, the USTA may resort to a new type of tarp being developed by DuPont. A more radical technology proposed by George W. Pratt Jr., a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the panel, would involve stripping the courts down and imbedding a wire mesh beneath the surface, much like a heat coil in a driveway.
Of course, whatever is used to heat the court – perhaps microwaves – would have to be safe for fans and the delicate surface that needs to remain impeccable for play.
And then there is the roof, or at least thoughts about one. The USTA estimates that it would cost more than $80 million to cover Arthur Ashe, a price that seems too steep considering how infrequently the tournament has suffered serious disruptions from inclement weather. Still, there’s the chance that one of the smaller stadiums, Armstrong or the Grandstand, could be fitted with a top of some kind down the road.
In the meantime, tennis fans can rejoice in the oldest method of keeping the courts dry – clear skies.