Honoring Billie Jean King’s Legacy
USTA SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
USTA SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
USTA Southern California continues its Tennis Town series, an initiative that shines a spotlight on thriving tennis communities across the region. These towns are dedicated to growing the sport and creating opportunities for players of all ages, backgrounds, abilities, identities, and beliefs. From private clubs and college courts to public parks, they champion grassroots, community-driven programs while fostering an inclusive and welcoming environment for everyone.
Since its launch in 2025, Tennis Towns has recognized multiple communities with rich tennis traditions and strong player engagement. Each feature includes an in-depth written profile researched by longtime Southern California tennis author and historian Steve Pratt, paired with a video spotlight showcasing the people, history, and unique character of the community.
Through this initiative, USTA Southern California highlights communities from across the region—from the Central Coast to San Diego and the Inland Empire to the Pacific Ocean—sharing their stories, history, achievements, and contributions to the growth of tennis in a region where more than 2.5 million people played tennis in 2024.
The first three Tennis Town honorees were Bakersfield (March), Ojai (May) and Claremont (August), each chosen for their dedication to preserving tennis history while promoting the game’s future. The series not only honors communities with outstanding facilities, programs, and tournaments, but also highlights the volunteers, coaches, and advocates who make tennis a vibrant part of local life.
Long Beach now joins this distinguished list as the latest Tennis Town in Southern California, recognized for its deep tennis roots, thriving facilities, and passionate players, including two Grand Slam Champion “Kings”—tennis’ all-time great Billie Jean King and fellow Poly High graduate Vania King.
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If you hang around tennis circles long enough in Long Beach, you’re bound to eventually run into someone with a Billie Jean King story.
“I knew her father and he was always after me to play her,” said 93-year-old Dale Jensen, who first played tennis in Long Beach 65 years ago. “We finally met when she was 13 or 14 and ended up playing doubles once a week. We had a great time.”
It becomes a game of “Memory” when talking to the old-timers, as they recall the names from the early 1950s that helped shape Long Beach into a true Southern California tennis town—figures like Clyde Walker, Billie Jean King’s first teacher, who gave lessons at Recreation Park, the very place that now bears the name of hometown hero Billie Jean King, perhaps the greatest female icon in all of sports.
Opened as the Billie Jean Moffitt King Tennis Center in 1968, the facility serves as one of two tennis hubs, along with the El Dorado Park Tennis Center just five miles across town, in the classic seaside city of nearly half a million residents in southern Los Angeles County.
Locals like Al Bray and Gene Buwick were influential in working with Poly High classmates Jerry Cromwell and King and teaching them the game as young teenagers.
Now the same age as Billie Jean King, 81-year-old Gene Simpson said a group led by Ted Matthews, Charles Felker, and Harold Guiver helped start the Long Beach Tennis Patrons and they gifted King with $2,000 to travel to Wimbledon in 1961 and, at just 17 years old, King and San Diego’s Karen Hantze, 18, became (and still are) the youngest to win the women’s doubles title at the All-England Club launching King’s Hall of Fame career.
In a 2014 article in the Long Beach Press-Telegram, it was reported that the Century Club had offered Billie Jean King money to travel to Wimbledon a year before when she was just 16, but King declined. “I wasn’t good enough yet,” she said.
Over the years, the memories fade and fewer and fewer are able to recall the post war-era of tennis and King’s formative years in the vibrant metropolis known for its classic Cyclone Racer roller coaster at the Pike’s wooden boardwalk and the Rainbow Pier off Ocean Boulevard where crowds watched as Howard Hughes launched his 200-ton all-wood flying boat the Spruce Goose, ultimately traveling one mile in its one and only flight.
With a vibrant history, nearly a dozen public parks to play, active USTA League teams and two thriving facilities that offer tennis and pickleball, Long Beach remains a vital link in the chain that is Southern California tennis.
“Billie Jean King has put an indelible stamp on the city and on the Long Beach tennis community,” said USTA Southern California President Cynthia Neiman, a longtime resident of Naples, a neighborhood in south Long Beach known for its famed Italy-like canals located in Alamitos Bay. “We have many courts making tennis available for Long Beach residents because we are trying to live up to the legacy of our icon and continue the tennis tradition of this really special place.”
A City Steeped in Tennis Tradition
The history of Long Beach tennis dates back to the turn of the 20th century. The city hosted the Southern California Championships from 1905 to 1920 at the Hotel Virginia on Ocean Boulevard following events in Riverside (1887), Santa Monica (1888-1903), and South Pasadena (1904). The event eventually moved to Los Angeles as the venerable L.A. Tennis Club was built in 1920 and the tournament soon after became known as the Pacific Southwest Championships.
After World War I, through the government’s Works Progress Administration expansion backed by revenue from Signal Hill oil and federal WPA programs, numerous public recreation facilities, including tennis courts were built in Long Beach.
On Halloween in 1938, the city welcomed the world’s best player after he had just completed the greatest season any tennis player had ever had. In what would be his final match as an amateur before turning professional, Don Budge faced former UCLA national collegiate champion Jack Tidball in an exhibition at the Long Beach Tennis Club. Tidball won in three sets on the newly dedicated grass courts.
Earlier that year, Budge had made history by becoming the first player to ever win all four major tournaments in a single calendar year, completing the first-ever Grand Slam. The Long Beach Sun reported that a high schooler by the name of Jack Kramer and a young Dodo Bundy also took part in three exhibition matches.
Budge praised the Long Beach grass courts as the best he’d played—second only to Wimbledon and Forest Hills—and encouraged Ben Park, president of the Long Beach Tennis Club, to build more courts in hopes of hosting future Davis Cup matches.
Billie Jean King’s presence was felt right around the time she was instrumental in the birth of women’s professional tennis as we know it today, including owning and staging two professional events held in Long Long Beach. In January of 1971, less than a year after the Original 9 signed $1 contracts in Houston in protest to the disparity in prize money between men and women in pro tennis, the Billie Jean King Invitational served as one of the first events of the Virginia Slims Circuit and was won by King. The tournament would later become the L.A. Women’s Tennis Championships played in Manhattan Beach, Carson and finally Carlsbad.
Jensen said you could read all about the tennis news of the day in the local paper, the Press-Telegram. Sportswriter Bob Martin wrote a weekly tennis column called “Tennis Talk” as requested by Dan Ridder, owner of Press-Telegram, who Jensen said owned a mansion in Park Estates where tournaments were held.
The Virginia Slims tournament returned in 1972 as Rosie Casals won the Independent Press-Telegram Championship played for the second straight year at Long Beach City College’s indoor gym on carpet.
Billie Jean King (right) and Rosie Casals (left) with Venus and Serena Williams.
Two Grand Slam Champion Kings From Poly High
Trivia Time: Excluding doubles siblings like the Bryans and Jensens, can you name two players with the same last name from the same high school who have won a Grand Slam title?
Answer: Billie Jean King and Vania King.
Billie Jean King amassed an astonishing 39 Grand Slam titles during her career: 12 in singles, 16 in women’s doubles, and 11 in mixed doubles and in her post-career achieved what one reporter once called “a person of god-like stature” in Long Beach. Vania, 36, is a current Florida resident who won Wimbledon and the US Open in doubles in 2010. She retired in 2018 after a 14-year career.
“Long Beach is where I had not only so much community support, but I was developed there and really credit all of my success for the formative years that I had being in Long Beach,” Vania said. ”My parents were immigrants from Taiwan and they didn’t always know what they were doing or understand the developmental pathway. The community banded together to support the talent it had.”
Long Beach’s most famous native, Billie Jean Moffitt started playing tennis at age 11 and hit for the first time after an invite to the Virginia Country Club from her best friend Susan Williams.
You can’t help but smile while Billie Jean King–whose name changed when she married Larry King in 1965 and has been with her longtime partner Ilana Kloss for more than four decades–lovingly talks about her humble tennis beginnings in Long Beach growing up in the little house on 36th Street in the Wrigley neighborhood near the club and attending Los Cerritos Elementary and Hughes Middle School before enrolling at Poly High.
“As we go out there, I’m thinking, ‘I’m not going to play here, my dad’s a firefighter,’” King recalled during the final day of the USTA Girls’ 16s & 18s Nationals in San Diego that, just like the central library in Long Beach, are named in honor of her.
She continued: “So we’re at the park and Susan tells our softball coach, ‘I took Billie out to play tennis’ and the coach says they have free instruction out here every Tuesday with Clyde Walker. Now we’re talking. So, I met Clyde and because of that moment I told my mother, ‘I found what I’m going to do with my life. I’m going to be the No. 1 tennis player in the world.’ And she said, ‘That’s fine, but you have homework.’…I was so excited. I figured out in softball I touched the ball six times a game and I got up once every nine batters. I can hit a hundred balls in less than five minutes in tennis.”
So enthralled was King with tennis from that first Tuesday meeting with Walker at Houghton Park that she made it a weekly habit and began following Walker around town. On Monday it was Silverado Park, Somerset on Wednesday, Ramona Park on Thursday and Rec Park on Saturday.
King once told the Los Angeles Times, “Clyde Walker started looking at me like, ‘Are you back again?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, let’s go.’ He knew he had a live one.”
King said Walker’s dream was to find two players who loved tennis and that he never found that in Texas where he came from. “He had that with me and Jerry Cromwell, who could’ve turned pro, but he went to Harvard (after winning a national title at USC) instead,” Billie Jean King said of Walker, who sadly was dying of cancer but held on long enough to hear of King winning her first Wimbledon title in 1961 before passing days later. “Not only did Clyde’s dream come true, but my dream came true because of Long Beach.”
King said, “I would’ve never made it without Long Beach – the people of Long Beach and the Park and Rec – no way! I remember once my parents couldn’t pay the $2 entry fee and Patrons paid it so I could play in Santa Ana. I could go on and on and on, and story after story.”
Recalling what she was thinking when Barack Obama placed the medal around her neck as the first female athlete presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, King said, “I was thinking about Long Beach. Clyde Walker, and Mr. Felker, and Mr. Matthews. And that they gave me money to go to Wimbledon. Does Long Beach matter for me personally? Yeah! It’s everything. That’s all I could think about.
“Every day I thank God I was born and raised in Long Beach.”
Everyone knows Tennis Hall of Famer Tracy Austin’s family grew up north of Long Beach in Palos Verdes just over the Vincent Thomas Bridge that leads into the South Bay, but few are aware that Tracy’s older brother John Austin was born in Long Beach adding another Grand Slam champion to the city’s tally behind the Kings as John and Tracy won the Wimbledon Mixed Doubles title in 1980.
‘There Is Something For Everyone’ at Two Central Facilities
The same year as Billie Jean King retired from tennis in 1983, a 22-year-old Cathy Jacobson, coming off a full-ride scholarship tennis career at the University of Pittsburgh, walked into the center named for Billie Jean King at 10th Street and Park Avenue.
“I was offered a job on the spot teaching tennis,” said Jacobson-Guzy, who in 1996 married Stan Guzy who works at the center today. She soon worked her way up to head pro and then director of the facility and later went into business with King forming a partnership with Billie Jean King’s Aces and was responsible for running programming at the facility until she passed the torch to the Bridge family in 2021.
“The Bridge family is really changing the game of tennis in Long Beach for sure,” Jacobson-Guzy explained. “There’s just been a lot of growth at both centers since they took over.”
Mitch Bridge has run his Southern California Tennis Academy out of El Dorado Park for the past 13 years. Originally from South Dakota, Bridge moved to Long Beach in 1984 to play for the men’s team at Cal-State Long Beach.
“When we started it was strong at the top and we had very little at the bottom,” Bridge explained in terms of the level of players at the academy. “And now our focus is flipped. We have a school’s program, and we are at 15 different schools where we play red ball on the blacktop.”
Bridge’s son Cooper serves as the general manager at both facilities through the LLC Bridge the Gap Tennis. “We really pride ourselves on that entry level programming with our junior tennis academy,” said Cooper, who also served as the tournament director for the 95th annual Long Beach Open that concluded the first weekend of October.
Mitch and his wife Kim, along with Cooper and older brother and Academy Head Coach Jordan, started a foundation component under Bridge the Gap Tennis introducing underserved kids to the sport—many for the first time—and also offering Free Play Days at El Dorado Park. The Bridges were named the USTA Southern California Family of the Year in 2023 at the organization’s Annual Service Awards.
The Bridge Family accepting the Family of the Year Award at the 2023 USTA Southern California Service Awards in Redondo Beach.
“I grew up in the public parks and just love all the other sports going on and the energy,” Mitch said, adding the pickleball craze has intensified at both facilities and the challenge is to continue offering both sports while not taking valuable court time from one another.
“There is still the demand for tennis,” he said. “It would be one thing if the tennis courts weren’t being used but we have plenty of usage.”
Local teaching pro Nick Zemlin said the facilities have managed to strike a good balance with the pickleball enthusiasts. “There was a bit of a learning curve at the beginning satisfying both crowds,” Zemlin said. “I think some of the tennis players had to learn to share, and vice versa, but I think we’ve struck a good balance.”
Zemlin didn’t get into tennis until high school but said Billie Jean King Tennis Center’s proximity to Wilson High was ideal. “It was really easy to just get out of school and just walk across the street and start playing,” he said. “That’s where I spent most of my hours after school, at one of the two facilities. It’s easy to find a court from just about wherever you are.”
Both the Billie Jean King Tennis Center and El Dorado Park host USTA League matches throughout the year. Beach Cities Area League Coordinator Gayle Hollenbaugh said the Flex League is another popular option for players who schedule matches on their own through the USTA Flex mobile app.
The Virginia Country Club remains one of the oldest clubs in Southern California, opened in 1909 and has three courts where former Wilson High and Cerritos College standout Nick Simonelli teaches members.
Long Beach State Women’s Team Source of Pride in Community
After nearly 30 years at the helm as the women’s tennis head coach at Long Beach State, the Jenny Hilt-Costello era finally finished last April as the 49ers fell in the Big West Conference semifinals to UC-Santa Barbara.
A former UCLA player, Hilt-Costello started as an assistant back in 1995 at Long Beach State University (LBSU) and she heads into retirement as the winningest coach in the school’s history ending with 429 career victories, 22 Big West Titles, winning nearly 70% of her matches and leading the Beach to 13 NCAA Tournament appearances.
Hilt-Costello reflected recently on how the school’s focus on Olympic sports keeps the spotlight on the program. “A lot of big programs focus on football and basketball, but I think Long Beach State spreads that wealth so that the other smaller sports feel like they’re getting the love and the attention.”
She continued: “Long Beach is a big city, but we’re a small community and that’s what’s so fantastic. I think the thing that I love so much at Long Beach State is that the community does know about what’s going on with our women’s tennis program. We get a lot of press coverage and the community does get involved in what we’re doing. The boosters that would come over for volleyball or baseball or basketball would see us and say, ‘What’s going on over at the tennis courts?’ And they’d come over and cheer the girls on. It was really a great thing to see the love of the community from a big city.”
In the Fall of 2008, the on-campus Rhodes Tennis Center was dedicated with the 12-court complex named for former LBSU tennis player and alum Terry Rhodes following his $1.25 million endowment to the women’s tennis program. The center hosts the women’s matches, as well as the Long Beach Open junior tournament each March and the Southern California Special Olympics in June.
The Hendricks Family Scoreboard was donated by the family of former LBSU women’s tennis coach Gloria Hendricks, whose husband Bob Hendricks taught at Wilson High School for over 30 years where he was the most successful boys’ tennis coach in school history.
Les and Cindy Robbins, along with her brother John Hendricks, donated $50,000 to help pay for the 19-foot high scoreboard. Gloria served as the LBSU women’s tennis coach from 1975-80, and Cindy, her daughter, played for the 49ers before graduating in 1974.
In August, Costello-Hilt’s three-year assistant Gertjan De Wilder from Belgium was named the interim coach to lead the 49ers this season. De Wilder is a former Division I, Division II, and junior college player for Eastern Illinois, Concordia, and Cypress College.
Intercollegiate Tennis Association Hall of Famer Peter Smith was the last men’s head coach at Long Beach State serving from 1988 to 1991 when the school decided to cut the program. Smith was just 23 when his former coach Larry Easley handed the team over to him as he became the youngest to ever coach a Division I program.
Smith went on to lead Fresno State, Pepperdine, and USC, where he coached for 17 seasons and won five national championships. He was inducted into the LBSU Hall of Fame in 2011 joining previous men’s tennis inductees Rikard Bergh in 1994 and longtime coach Dan Campbell in 1990. Bergh was a US Open quarterfinalist in 1991. A native of Sweden, Bergh was Long Beach State’s No. 1 player in 1986 and 1987 and a two-time All-American. As a pro he had wins over Stefan Edberg, John and Patrick McEnroe, Ivan Lendl, Jim Courier, Boris Becker, and Michael Chang.
“We’ve had some incredible names come out of Long Beach,” said Smith, who noted recently retired CEO of the WTA Steve Simon played at LBSU.
Smith also recalled working with a young Glenn Weiner as a junior after his family moved to Long Beach from South Africa. Weiner was No. 1 in the 12s and as a pro reached as high as No. 86 in the world. He eventually moved on to Nick Bollettieri’s IMG Academy where he remains a coach today.
On the women’s side, the nod for top all-time player at LBSU would go to Hannah Grady from England, who is the only women’s tennis player in the school’s Hall of Fame. A former assistant coach, Grady has Court 1 named for her and was the first player in Big West history to be named Big West Player of the Year during all four years leading the 49ers to four straight conference titles. Her 172 collegiate wins are a Long Beach State and Big West record.
Long Beach and Billie Jean King: A Perfect Pairing
Has there ever been a player in the history of the game more synonymous with one city like Billie Jean King is to Long Beach?
In 2010, an ESPN feature called “Homecoming” brought King back to her hometown and a decision needed to be made about where the location of the “This is Your Life” style show would be filmed. There was talk about the Poly High gymnasium, or perhaps at Cal-State Los Angeles, where recently a statue of King was unveiled.
Longtime teaching pro Aba Villena was one of 1,200 local residents who showed up that day to watch, and was glad King and the producers settled on the BJK Tennis Center where Villena has worked since 2006.
“It was great meeting her,” Villena said. “She’s an icon, but yet she was just this normal person. And she’s just such a big fan of the game, too.”
Jacobson-Guzy calls King “everything to me” and recently revealed a story on how the two met and started their friendship. “We were watching a World TeamTennis match in Pittsburgh and Roscoe Tanner hit a serve that hit my grandmother in the nose. So, Billie came up and put an icepack on her.”
They exchanged information and the two stayed in touch. “She said I reminded her a lot of herself with my energy,” Jacobson-Guzy said. “She’s a hero of mine and always will be.”
Cathy Jacobson-Guzy and Billie Jean King at the 2025 USTA Billie Jean King Girls’ Nationals tournament in San Diego.
She added: “Long Beach is just something special. It means so much being Billie Jean King’s hometown. The tennis community is a special breed of people that show up regularly to play socially and in leagues and tournaments. I’m proud to be a resident of Long Beach.”
Neiman grew up idolizing King and said what struck her the first time they met in August was how funny she was and all the amazing Long Beach stories she recalled because of her incredible memory. “She is someone who both means so much to the game of tennis, and to our society and our culture,” Neiman said. “I was so impressed by Billie’s humility and gratitude. She never forgot where she came from and the people who helped her along the way.”
As the first female to be named USTA Southern California President in the 138-year history of the section, Neiman was deeply inspired by King as a pioneer and leader in her sport. It’s individuals like these two, and so much more, that make Long Beach worthy of the Southern California Tennis Town honor.
