Town Honor Bestowed to the City of Ojai
USTA SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
USTA SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
USTA Southern California continues its Tennis Town series, a celebration of thriving tennis communities across our region. This initiative highlights local towns, such as the first Tennis Town recipient in March, the City of Bakersfield, that have been instrumental in the growth of SoCal tennis and where tennis is more than just a sport – it’s woven into the fabric of daily life. These towns are the heart of Southern California’s great tennis legacy.
Each Tennis Town selected in the ongoing series researched and written by longtime Southern California tennis author and historian Steve Pratt and accompanied by a video feature, embodies the passion, excitement, spirit, and impact of local tennis at its best. The Tennis Town has been instrumental in the growth of SoCal tennis through a robust tennis scene, with active players of all ages and levels. These communities welcome all players, regardless of age, background, ability, identity, or beliefs and provide grassroots community-driven programs, teach tennis in the schools and provide scholarships for students to be able to take tennis lessons.
Through this initiative, USTA Southern California will spotlight these communities – 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.
USTA Southern California is thrilled to recognize the City of Ojai as the next recipient of the Tennis Town honor.
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Stacy Margolin Potter can still recall that morning she awoke from her host family’s home on the east side of Ojai at the age of 16 and stepped onto the patio that overlooked the Soule Park Golf Course.
That memory of the eerie stillness, the quiet of the morning and those massive oak and sycamore trees that lined the course still remains deeply embedded in Potter’s mind some 50 years later.
“I said to myself, ‘I’m going to live here someday,’” said Potter, who grew up in Beverly Hills and was used to waking up to the urban noise of the city.
The occasion for Potter’s Ojai visit in the 1970s is similar to thousands of others who come to the small town of 8,000 residents 75 miles northwest of Los Angeles each end of April – to play in one of the oldest and most storied tennis tournaments in the country, the Ojai Tennis Tournament. The venerable event played on more than 115 courts across West Ventura County recently concluded its 123rd edition in a historic year as the Big Ten Conference women competed in the postseason championships for the first time with Ohio State scoring a breath-taking finals upset win over the nation’s No. 3 team and the Buckeyes’ bitter rival Michigan.
It was two years before that predestined statement made by Potter that she played in her first Ojai and won the Girls’ 14s in 1973 on a cloudy day on Libbey Park’s Court 1. “From that point on I just forever had this feeling about Ojai,” said Potter, who would go on to play for USC before joining the WTA pro tour. “It just had this special spirituality about it…and that I had played really well and felt so comfortable. It just had this relaxed feeling to it.”
Potter’s early premonition came true as she and her husband, Ian, settled in Ojai 30 years ago and continue to run their successful business Trails by Potter giving hikes to locals and tourists.
It was a hike up Rose Valley in the Los Padres National Forest that first led Mark Weil to Ojai. A native New Orleanian who had moved to Southern California after founding and managing a theater company in New York City while also coaching competitive juniors in Manhattan, Weil was in search of a truly special place to start the first and only boarding tennis academy on the West Coast.
Like Potter, Weil said he immediately fell in love with the town first inhabited by the Chumash Indians – Ojai is a Chumash word meaning “the Nest” – and written about by Charles Nordhoff, a roving correspondent for the New York Herald around the year 1872.
“I didn’t know anything about it but I could just feel that it was a very special place,” said Weil, who founded the Weil Tennis Academy in 1997. “I did a little bit of research on the tennis and the history of The Ojai. That was it for me and I was sold. I wanted my family and kids to be raised here. It’s a place that just has a lot of soul.”
Ojai and tennis are inextricably linked, just like Indianapolis and auto racing, Kentucky and horse racing, and Augusta, Ga., and golf. To understand the City of Ojai’s relationship with tennis is to understand its rich history, and that begins with the Thacher family.
A Timeless Tradition Dating Back to 1896
Sherman Day Thacher followed his older brother Edward, who had come to Ojai from the East Coast to become a farmer and grow citrus in the early 1880s. Soon after, Sherman began tutoring students on the ranch, which led to the formation of The Thacher School. In 1890, brother William Thacher, the New England and intercollegiate tennis doubles champion while at Yale University, joined them and two years later the first tennis court in the Valley was built on the school grounds.
Sherman founded the Ojai Valley Athletic Club in 1894; and the next year, William formed the Ojai Valley Tennis Club, also serving as the first President of the club. The first Ojai event took place in 1896 with a challenge against the Ventura Tennis Club and the following year, the OVTC sponsored an inter-county competition, teaming with Ventura to challenge Santa Barbara; and later combined forces with Ventura and Santa Barbara to challenge Los Angeles and Pasadena.
The entire town came out in April of 1898, for a “State Tournament” pitting the best players from Northern and Southern California in a round-robin match. In 1899, the tournament adopted the single elimination format and offered multiple categories of play, adding interscholastic singles and doubles matches.
Tea was William’s drink of choice, and he first introduced the tradition of serving tea to tournament competitors and spectators in 1904. Ojai native Tony Thacher, the grandson of Sherman Thacher and grand-nephew of tournament founder William, said William would share tea with students and it’s been said that he would hang a sign marked “T” in his window to signal to students that he was available for tea and cookies.
In 1905, there were over 100 competitors playing at The Ojai, and in 1907, girls’ interscholastic competition was added. By 1912, there were 272 entrants in 12 events, making it the largest tournament in the United States.
Women’s intercollegiate competition began in 1916. In spite of the impending war, the tournament was held with the proceeds of the 22nd Ojai turned over to the Red Cross. That same year, a major fire swept through the valley and the tournament was held at the YMCA in downtown Los Angeles in 1918.
Women compete at the Ojai Valley Tennis Club at Nordhoff.
There have been seven years when the tournament was cancelled – the first in 1924 due to an outbreak of foot and mouth disease among California livestock that restricted travel for much of the state, four years during World War II (1942-46) and two years because of Covid (2020-21).
Rose Boggs, age 97, is another Ojai native and she can still remember tournaments in the early 1930s. Her father was the Libbey Park groundskeeper, and she was tasked with picking up trash from under the bleachers as a young child. She was in the Garden Club and made flowers for the courts, a tradition that remains today. She served on the transportation committee and even called lines while a student at Ventura College.
“We would climb over the tree that’s over there and sit on the metal framing that was used for the Tea Tent during the tournament,” Boggs said, being interviewed in the park during the recent tournament. “That was our playground. I attended Nordhoff during the war years so there was no tennis anywhere.”
Complimentary orange juice was first offered to players and spectators in the early 1930s and is yet another tradition that remains today. There is a famous story involving all-time great Jack Kramer about playing in an all-night poker game and losing all his money only to have to snack on cookies and orange juice the next day, falling ill and losing his semifinal match.
Some traditions have not survived, however, including the street dance down Main Street attended by child actress Shirley Temple in 1942, which “created pandemonium” as once described by Kramer.
93 Grand Slam Champs Who Played Ojai
Santa Monica’s May Sutton Bundy probably brought the most fame to the Ojai tournament during the early years. She was the first woman from the United States to win at Wimbledon (1905 and 1907). “Big” Bill Tilden was said to have slept under the oak trees and as the captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team, he brought members of the team to play The Ojai in 1928.
In the year 2000 to celebrate the 100th Ojai tournament, organizers created a wall in front of Court 1 listing all the players who have played Ojai and went on to win a Grand Slam in singles, doubles or mixed doubles. There are currently 93 names on the Wall of Fame, including Ellsworth Vines, Bobby Riggs, Tony Trabert, Pancho Gonzales, Rosie Casals, Stan Smith, Jimmy Connors, Tracy Austin, Michael Chang, Lindsay Davenport, Pete Sampras and the Bryan twins. Former UCLA star Ena Shibahara is the most recent name added.
Arthur Ashe at The Ojai in 1964.
Except for the four Grand Slams, there are few tournaments that can boast hosting both Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe. And even fewer still who can say they were crowned champions on the same day. But it happened twice at The Ojai as the Long Beach native and the UCLA player won titles in 1964 and 1965.
For most of his life, venue setup volunteer Dennis Jenks has worked at the Ojai Tournament. Jenks’ grandmother, Ruby Garland, was the first Ojai women’s winner, and he remembers Ashe staying at his parents’ Ojai home during those early years.
A few years back, Jenks recalled Ashe making it to the final and warming up against the Jenks’ garage wall. Ashe had forgotten to set his clock the night before because of daylight savings time and was an hour late for the final. “My mom came running out and said, ‘Arthur, you’re late for your match,’” Jenks said. “Arthur still thought he had an hour left. We raced him over to the courts and he was a little late, but of course, they would never default Arthur Ashe.”
Longtime tournament volunteer Sam Eaton was there that day King and Ashe won their titles, and found himself on the court for both matches as he was in charge of the ball kids as a member of the Thacher tennis team and assigned himself to the court where King and Ashe played. Currently in charge of score posting on the massive draw boards in the park, Eaton remains a vital link to the tournament’s past – his great grandmother poured tea – and its future as his son Chris assists him each year.
Eaton said the key to the tournament’s success is that “the community really likes this tournament, and they roll out for it every year.”
Ojai Valley Tennis Club President Carolyn Burke feels it is people like Jenks and Eaton who are the lifeblood of the tournament. “We work all year round and then the tournament is here and we go, ‘Wow, our reward is here’ and we have all these people coming to town and the players and their families and coaches and they really do take over our town for the entire week.”
Burke said there is no tournament without the 600-plus volunteers, but Weil thinks that number is even higher. “They say 600 to 700 hundred volunteers but I think it’s closer to a thousand when you think about the pixie growers and all the other areas in the valley that support the tournament,” he said.
Documenting The Ojai On the Big Screen
Yet another longtime Ojai Tournament volunteer, Holly Roberts, had an idea around seven years ago as she wondered why no one had ever done a documentary about the historic Ojai Tournament.
The event’s official photographer and the sports editor of the weekly newspaper the Ojai Valley News, Roberts invited her filmmaker partner Ryan Del Nero to The Ojai in 2019 where they began capturing interviews from players, coaches, OVTC board members and volunteers.
“It’s unbelievable that no one has done it before,” Roberts said. “I always had this vision to do a documentary. Ryan wasn’t sure there was a story there, at first, but after experiencing it and seeing all the traditions and all the work that goes into it, he really got hooked.”
Once Covid hit the world in March of 2020, the story was there would be no Ojai Tournament for the first time since World War II and it was also not played in 2021. “I came through here in 2020 and there was yellow caution tape around the courts,” Roberts said. “It was just so silent. And then to come back in 2022, you could just feel the buzz around the park and it was really exciting to have tennis here again after a two-year gap.”
The feature-length film is narrated by award-winning actor and Ojai resident Malcolm McDowell.
A rough cut of the documentary was shown during the Thursday night of the tournament in April and the final product with the first Big Ten Conference footage added in will be finished in the coming months. Roberts said her hope is to submit the documentary to film festivals or to sell the rights to one of the streaming services. She said if it does get picked up, a portion of the proceeds would go back to the tournament and the youth tennis programs it supports. To learn more about the documentary, go to: TheOjaiDoc.com.
The Youth Is Served in Ojai
As the head tennis professional for the City of Ojai Recreation Department, Katya Welborn knows the importance the tournament plays in helping youth earn scholarships for tennis lessons, teaching tennis in the schools and helping finance maintenance for the eight, and only, public and free tennis courts in Ojai at Libbey Park.
A native of Ojai who grew up playing the tournament, Welborn also serves on the Ojai Youth Tennis Committee alongside co-chairman Craig Fugle and Scott Burton.
“The Ojai is such an inspiration to the kids,” said Welborn, who estimates she teaches around 500 kids the game each year. “Whether they are beginners or high school tournament-level players looking at what college they want to attend, they have that little opportunity to be right there on the court watching them as many of the juniors serve as ball runners during the tournament.”
In October 2024, the first USTA Level 5 Ojai October Classic was held with more than 130 juniors competing. There are two USTA Level 6 junior events that take place in Ojai each year and are sponsored by the Weil Tennis Academy. In the first event, held in early March, 120 juniors participated and there is another L6 event coming up later this month. The Ventura County Junior Tennis Association holds two events each year at the Ojai Valley Athletic Club, a private club with 11 lighted courts where Ryan Gaston serves as the director of tennis.
During The Ojai, the Men’s and Women’s Open pro divisions take place at the five-star resort Ojai Valley Inn on four courts with a cozy pro shop run by Director of Tennis Dimitar Yazadzhiev.
Ojai Named Tennis Town Once Again
The title of Tennis Town is not new to Ojai. Back in 2009, the USTA put on a nationwide contest searching for a city committed to the sport and its growth in the community. Ojai finished runners-up to Midland, Mich., in an online vote for the title of “Best Tennis Town” and received $50,000 and an introduction at the US Open attended by the city’s mayor, as well as OVTC board members, including Thacher.
“Imagine little Ojai going back there and going up against Midland, Michigan, which was endowed by the huge Dow corporation, and I’m sitting there in huge Arthur Ashe Stadium and watching our Mayor and we won second prize,” Thacher said.
Burke thinks there will always be an Ojai Tennis Tournament and echoed a statement past president Alan Rains told the Los Angeles Times in 2000 when he was asked if the tournament would continue for another hundred years. “Are you against apple pie?”
Concluded Burke, who said the 2026 Ojai Tournament will welcome the Big Ten Conference men’s teams as they alternate spots with the women: “We’ve reinvented a little bit each year and this is our 123rd, so we’re not going anywhere. I do envision it to keep going because there are so many people dedicated to it and who feel so strongly about it. There are so many traditions, and those will continue, but we will keep doing new things to make the tournament special in its own way. We’ll always have the traditions of the Tea Tent and the orange juice, but we’re adding new twists all the time.”
