Neighbors in Gunbarrel are outraged over a new tennis club. We hear from the founder.

In the next two years, Boulder County will lose 27 tennis courts. These courts are home to two of Boulder’s most utilized tennis programs. One is home to the Rocky Mountain Tennis Center behind the Millennium Hotel. The other is the University of Colorado Boulder’s tennis team, which currently operates out of the school’s CU South campus.

When the Rocky Mountain Tennis Center received word it would have to shut down, it wasn’t the first time Kendall Chitambar and his wife, Donna, the two primary coaches at the tennis center, seriously considered relocating.

The couple, along with a business partner, have, in the past 20 years, secured funding and purchased two other pieces of land with hopes of creating a more publicly accessible tennis club for Boulder County. Because of some unfortunate timing and a down economy, neither property panned out. By 2018, investor fatigue set in, and the partners decided to give up on the whole idea.

When news came in 2021 that the Millennium Hotel would be redeveloped into housing, Kendall and Donna decided they had to give it one more shot. They secured funding, found investors, and purchased a property in Gunbarrel, east of 71st Street, but now they are facing hundreds of neighbors who say they don’t want the facility in their backyard.

We heard from those neighbors last week when they held a community meeting with more than 200 attendees.

This week, KGNU’s Alexis Kenyon talks with Kendall Chitambar about what he thinks about the protests and what it will mean if the center can’t relocate.

Interview Transcript with KGNU’s Alexis Kenyon and Kendall Chitambar:

 I’m curious how you guys ended up in Gunbarrel.

So, in 2022, we made up our minds that we were going to try one more time. We had tried twice. I hope it’s the third time’s a charm, not three strikes you’re out. I really hope for it, and we’ve put everything into it, our family finances. We supported this financially from August of 2022 until Jan. 2 when we got our first investor funding, which was unbelievable.

And so we started a land search at that time and found this property in Gunbarrel, just beyond Boulder Country Club. Boulder Country Club currently has a three-to-five-year waitlist just to get in. So, we used that as a litmus test, showing that folks from Boulder are willing to drive this way, and by the way, we’re centrally located within Boulder County. Gunbarrel has these beautiful trails out here, but there’s no other recreation other than Boulder Country Club, which serves a specific demographic and has beautiful facilities, but they’re not accessible to everyone.

Boulder Country Club currently has a three-to-five-year waitlist just to get in. So, we used that as a litmus test, showing that folks from Boulder are willing to drive this way, and by the way, we’re centrally located within Boulder County. Gunbarrel has these beautiful trails out here, but there’s no other recreation other than Boulder Country Club, which serves a specific demographic and has beautiful facilities, but they’re not accessible to everyone.

We were excited that there were families we could cater to and provide recreational activities to right in town. We were excited to work with the folks in Gunbarrel and bring something special and unique to the area that hasn’t had a proper recreational facility other than BCC.

So tell me about your plans. You mentioned a clubhouse. I hear there’s a swimming pool?

Yes, and that’s to provide recreational use for families. When families come and the kids are playing tennis, we want moms to be able to hang out at the pool. When the kids are done playing tennis, on a hot day, we want them to be able to go cool off in the pool. There’ll be an opportunity for lap swimmers to swim laps, to teach swim lessons as well as an additional use at the site.

We want to be a Division I facility. So, the idea is to have six courts just for teaching and for the University of Colorado and 18-20 courts altogether.

So, we want to create a play facility for members and the public to come and play when they want to play. Right now, in Boulder County, we have access to 27 courts. But in the indoor season, we go from 27 courts down to five.  So the idea is to have two separate facilities indoors, one for development and one just for play.

There will be a modest clubhouse and tennis bubbles. But even the clubhouse is designed to look like a farmhouse. We are doing everything we can to make all the structures blend in. We’re even going to be working with local environment experts to make sure that our bubbles blend into the landscape,

And then, we are leaving half of our 10-acre parcel undeveloped.  5 acres of land will remain as they are.

Were you at the meeting last Sunday?

No, but actually,  I would love to speak to the group of folks who are concerned in the neighborhood. We want to be good neighbors and we want to participate in local concerns. We want to be an advocate for local concerns and to be the best neighbor possible.

So, the concerns are, generally, about light pollution, traffic, and wildlife being displaced. Do you have any response to these concerns?

Well, on the light side, we’re still debating on whether we’re going to have lights out there at all or not. We don’t have lights at the current facilities, and we’ve gotten by pretty well.

We did a full traffic study, and the traffic study that came back showed that the road system out there is well beyond the capacity of what we would be adding to it.

The way to think about it is that you can only have so many people playing tennis on one court at one time. You know, it’s not like it’s 20 people per court, and then we’re going to have a massive surge of people at one time. It’s dispersed throughout the day.

So we’ll have a certain number of people that come in at 6 a.m., and then a certain number of people that come in at 8 a.m., and then again at 10 a.m. So it’ll be steady, but it’ll be dispersed.

And I’m sad to see the signs out there. I hope that the neighbors that have put up signs will eventually accept us.

I know that there’s a group that wants to see it more rural out there, and I’m a nature lover myself. It’s my priority to work within the natural ecosystem out there to continue to support wildlife in the area.

We don’t consider ourselves the 79th Street Tennis Complex. We don’t think of ourselves as kind of an industrial waste issue. We consider ourselves a sport for families and children and seniors and kids in wheelchairs. And we have two of the top wheelchair juniors in the world that have played at the US Open.

We want to have a place where we can exist, and that’s really, that’s our request, allow us the right to exist, I think, more than anything.

What is your timeline?

Well, we’re hoping that we can be open by the summer of 2025. But at this point, we’re required to move at the end of April. The new development project at the Millennium Hotel will start at that time. CU is hosting us for the rest of the year, but then CU South is being redeveloped. But hopefully, we’ll be able to recapture it in the summer of next year.

What happens if the neighbor’s pushback makes it so that you have to find a new spot?

I don’t know. Honestly, that one’s hard. We’ve got a lot of people, a lot of demographics that count on us. And that’s a hard one for us. I kind of see the end of the road on that side, and then it’ll be kind of up to the city of Boulder to provide. I know there’s a long-term plan to try to build new courts, unfortunately, the timeline is such that at least for four or five years, we’ll lose the support and all the momentum that we’ve made, all the energy that we’ve captured over the last decades, it’ll be the city of Boulder starting over.