Blue-Gray Tennis Classic another victim of COVID-19

By TIM GAYLE

The 73rd annual Blue-Gray National Tennis Classic was set for this weekend at Lagoon Park, but like so many other sporting events scheduled in the last 12 months, the college tennis tournament has become a victim of the coronavirus pandemic.

“In 52 years, we’ve never canceled the tournament,” Blue-Gray director Kimberly Mathews said. “It’s so sad. Last year, this is the one event that the teams came to. Then their season was canceled.”

Last year’s event crowned the Wake Forest women’s tennis team and the Ole Miss men’s tennis team as champions, a tradition started in 1984 when the tournament switched from the singles’ competition envisioned by founder Jack Bushman to NCAA participants that would add a women’s division just 10 years ago. The Blue-Gray committee held off until early December, Mathews said, before finally deciding to cancel the 2021 event, the first time since 1969 the tournament hasn’t been held. 

“We were hoping we could squeeze it in but the SEC changed the schedule and moved up the play dates and cut out a lot of the non-conference dates, like they did for all the sports,” Mathews said. “When they did that, we had no teams left for Blue-Gray.”

Organizers decided to fill the void with a community play date, an opportunity to keep the name alive -- winners will receive Blue-Gray gifts -- both among the tennis community that supports the event and the sponsors who help finance it. The “Lagoon-A-Palooza” will feature three divisions of adult competition in both men’s and women’s divisions that will compete on Saturday from 10 a.m.-2 p.m.   

“It’s just to kind of keep the Blue-Gray vibe going and get everybody together,” Mathews said. “We’re playing league right now but there’s not a lot of social aspect of anything going on, so we wanted to get our Blue-Gray family together and play a little tournament and maybe raise a little money for the Montgomery Public Schools. 

“We’ve got several high schools and middle schools in town that don’t even have equipment so we’re trying to raise money to buy racquets and balls for kids to have a tennis season.”

In the meantime, the organization is focused on bringing back the event in 2022 and putting together a slate of teams for the 2023 event.

“The sense that we’re getting, not just from the SEC schools but the teams that are coming every year, is this is a one-off,” Mathews said. “Right now, the teams are playing indoors and you can’t even go watch them play. Until they move outside at the end of the March, we can’t even go watch. But we’re getting commitments from our 2022 teams. We have had one (men’s tennis) program that has been canceled and that’s at Fresno State.”

The Fresno State men’s tennis team participated in the 2020 event and was scheduled to compete in the 2021 event before the school announced the cancellation of the sport. The loss of revenue suffered by collegiate programs throughout the nation is causing some athletic directors to cut back on sports offered by the athletics department. Since the last of September, when athletic directors began announcing cuts, at least 23 college tennis programs have been eliminated as cost-cutting measures.

“What we’ve tried to do is line up some of our programs within driving distance like Tulane, South Alabama, UAB and have them on standby to come and fill in if we have any cancellations,” Mathews said, “because I don’t think we’ve seen the end of fallout. I think we’re going to see more teams discontinued.”

The Blue-Gray is especially vulnerable to COVID-19 restrictions because of the unique setup where players are housed in the homes of tennis sponsors. The coronavirus affects not only the college tennis programs worried about housing their athletes in the homes of strangers, but the tennis sponsors who are worried about opening their homes to college athletes from other parts of the country.  

“We were really concerned about that,” Mathews said. “We had several doctors and medical professionals on a committee we formed back in October and they were watching NCAA and CDC guidelines. They had recommended that even if we had a tournament, we don’t stay in people’s houses so we had already made a decision that we wouldn’t house and that we would play the tournament with whoever who could come and work with hotels.

“I’m looking forward to things getting back to normal. These schools will be on the forefront with vaccinations. I’m sure we will still have some families who decide not to house athletes, but I do think most of the people will, so we may see a blended housing situation next year. We’ll just have to respect the personal decisions of the coaches and the families.

“But that’s what makes the Blue-Gray the Blue-Gray.”

The idea to hold the “Lagoon-A-Palooza” event was two-fold, both as a means of raising money and awareness for MPS tennis programs as well as raise awareness and funding for future Blue-Gray tournaments.

“If you don’t get on somebody’s budget each year, they can forget about you,” Mathews pointed out, “so we made a decision and sent out more than 270 letters requesting donations and telling them what we would be doing with the money, that it would be going for Montgomery Public Schools and that we were holding an event. The main reason we did that is just to stay in front of everybody and give them the dates for next year.”