Brisbane Hoping To Expand Facilities

Written by: Bob Larson Tennis on 7th January 2014

Sony Open tennis tournament on Key Biscayne, Florida

Brisbane Hoping To Expand Facilities

epa03633617 A ball boy holds a tennis ball during the Jie Zheng of China against Yaroslava Shvedova of Kazakhstan first round match at the Sony Open tennis tournament in Miami, Florida, USA, 20 March 2013. EPA/RHONA WISE |

The Brisbane International set an attendance record with 105,730 fans watching the like of Roger Federer, Lleyton Hewitt, Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka strike balls at the Queensland Tennis Centre.

The tournament would love to add a large secondary show court and could even add seats to its center court, Pat Rafter Arena, but it will need government funding to do so and the Queensland Sports Ministry has yet to commit to the outlay.

However, while the funding has yet to come through, there are drawings for a second stadium to the immediate east of the existing Pat Rafter arena.

“I wouldn’t like to speculate on a timeframe and it is a tough economic environment at the moment and stadiums like that do cost a lot of money,” Tennis Queensland chief executive Cameron Pearson told the Courier-Mail. “We’d need to make sure it was sustainable and perhaps multipurpose if it was to ever go ahead and we’d do that in conjunction with the government and Stadiums Queensland to ensure it’s used in the best possible way for the majority of the year. As the tournament grows, we need to look at the facilities here and what’s needed to support that growth.”

While the main stadium is state of the art with luxury boxes that accommodate sponsors, and most fans are pleased that all show courts are covered with roofs, the grounds don’t offer much to those in attendance for food or entertainment.

“The crowds we’ve got this year are probably the biggest we can get on the footprint that we have,” Pearson said. “We’ve got to be smarter in some of our site plans, looking at the way we lay the venue out. The current layout was designed a few years ago and our crowds have increased in the past two years by about 15 per cent, so we probably need to have a look at that again.”

Topics: 10sballs.com, Brisbane International, Cameron Pearson, Lleyton Hewitt, Pat Rafter Arena, Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Tennis, Tennis News, Victoria Azarenka