Pharr Tennis Center in Austin, Texas by Studio Balcones
Renovated two years ago to mitigate stormwater damage, the courts at the Pharr Tennis Center in East Austin, Texas might have undergone a conventional municipal upgrade—closing cracks with a polyurethane binder, planting new Bermuda grass—if not for pioneering Austin legislation. In 2022, the city became the first in the country to require all parks projects costing $2 million or more to meet the SITES standard for environmental sustainability.
The result is a refurbished 3.9-acre recreational complex, a full quarter of which is seeded to resemble a native Blackland prairie meadow, a Texas ecoregion extending from north of Dallas to San Antonio. Rain gardens, buffalo sod, and preserved pecan, post oak, and live oak trees weave through the grounds around the refinished blue-painted tennis courts, and wild missed shots periodically send fluffy yellow balls flying into the wildflower meadows, which bloom year-round and buzz with pollinator habitats.
Jennifer Orr, a principal landscape architect of Studio Balcones, which led the design and project management before the company merged with Connect One Design and Lionheart earlier this year, says the renovation became a chance to deal with flooding through intensive water-absorbing plantings and recessed surface water collection. “It is an extremely sustainable project where we did all of the stormwater aboveground,” she says.
The scope of the project included renovation of a small tennis shop built in 1975 that suffered from such regular flooding that sandbags were being used as an improvised berm to stay dry. “That’s now mitigated through green stormwater infrastructure on-site,” says Meredith Gauthier, sustainability and resilience program manager for the parks department. “It also reduces erosion downstream.”
They ground up the asphalt of the old courts to reuse as paving and gravel, protecting the beds of the Heritage Red Oak trees from being compacted by foot traffic, and re-poured the tennis courts, sloping them two degrees to shed water at the foot of the oaks and into the meadows.
Replacing Bermuda grass with buffalo sod and wildflower meadows means that the parks department had to rethink its maintenance program. Otherwise the more than 43 native grass and forb species wouldn’t have a chance to provide habitat for a biodiverse mix of bird and insects. With constant turnover of limited staff, restraining their mowing routine turned out to be the most challenging part. The designers made a maintenance manual with diagrams of where to mow on a quarterly schedule and where to mow on a yearly schedule, consulting with project manager and following up repeatedly with parks staff, said Orr. “I can’t tell you how hard it is to get a parks department to not mow things,” she said.
