Reid Tennis Club celebrates 90 years of making people feel they belong

The Reid Tennis Club celebrates its 90th birthday this year, a much-treasured oasis of green in the heart of Canberra.

The inaugural meeting of the club was held at the Ainslie School on August 27, 1928.

As current president Terry Walker says, the club was right there at the beginning of Canberra.

"In 1928 there were probably 8000 people in Canberra. This is a time that's about 40 years before the lake; a year after the opening of Old Parliament House," he said.

Minutes of that historic gathering and subsequent meetings were painstakingly recorded in a green book that the club still owns and intends to hand over to the ACT Heritage Society for prosperity.

The neat handwriting in ink pen of the assigned secretary meticulously details the development of the club. Every meeting ended with a polite note of appreciation to the hosts for the supper.

"Always tea and scones. No mention of coffee," Mr Walker, 73, said, with a laugh.

"These minutes are a wonderful look at Canberra society as it was in the very early days. For more than 50 years they were held by the Boag family, who lived opposite the courts, and, more recently, by myself."

The club, in Dirrawan Gardens, could boast having four world senior tennis champions in its membership ranks: squash legend Heather McKay, her sister Kay Schiavinato, Alison Ide and Brian Hurley. Mr Hurley, now 93 and living in Hawker, was still playing at the club until recently.

"Having said that, our most successful person to play tennis at Reid was Wally Masur who went on to become number 15 in the world in 1993," Mr Walker said.

"Our archives show him playing in a gentleman doubles Sunday morning team in 1976 with his father, Kurt who still lives in Canberra."

Mr Walker joined the club in 1964 after he moved from Forbes in country NSW to Canberra to work in the Department of Immigration. By the next year, he was the club's men's singles champion.

"I learnt to play tennis with my mother, so I've been playing all my life. Now that I'm 73, tennis is a sport for life," he said.

Mr Walker was representative of many of the club's longer-standing members – coming to a new town in 1963 without any prior connections and staying in the Reid House hostel – the club was another way to feel a part of something.

"It was a great way to meet people. When I went to Reid, they were extremely welcoming," he said.

"And an enormous part of the club's appeal has been its location as well as its ambience and garden setting."

One former Canberra family who now lived in Canada even maintained their membership at Reid to play tennis when they visited on holidays.

"They want to belong. That's why people join the club and keep their membership at Reid," Mr Walker said.

Reid Tennis Club, which has 200 members, continues to thrive. It had juniors being coached every Wednesday night; adults playing cardio tennis once a week and a regular open day held to encourage new members.

The club will celebrate its milestone with a dinner on Monday at the Mecure Hotel, formerly the Hotel Ainslie, on Limestone Avenue, the venue chosen because it is as old as the club.

A guest speaker will be Tennis Canberra chief executive Kim Kachel, who said tennis was proving to be an increasingly popular sport in the national capital. There had been a record 27,570 tennis participants in Canberra last financial year, double the previous year's figures. Mr Kachel said a large part of that leap was the promotion of tennis in schools; 15,413 school children participated in the sport last year.

And Reid was also part of that success story.

"Reid's a fantastic community club," Mr Kachel said. "It's a huge milestone to be celebrating 90 years and it has some wonderful community tennis members. It is an important part of the fabric of our tennis community."