Spring Returns and Here Come the Wind Screens
With the recent warming trend, you’ll notice that some of the wind screens at the club are being replaced, moved, or re-installed. Wind screens on our courts are an important feature that allow for better visibility of the ball and help to cut down the power of some of Reno’s famous wind gusts.
But they do take a beating in our weather, and after a few seasons, a typical screen suffers rips and tears sufficient to warrant early retirement. To minimize damage, your WTC Board members and other club volunteers do their best to keep the screens anchored to the fence fabric, installing zip-ties in all available grommet holes and replacing ties that have broken.
Many have wondered why we use plastic zip ties that inevitably break. Why not tie wind screens down with metal wire? As it turns out, we want the plastic ties to break beyond a certain level of stress. If wind screens are tied down with metal, then high winds push so hard on the unforgiving wind screens that they actually bend the fences. This is what happened recently to the north fences of courts 5-8 at the Plumas courts.
Once a few ties break, the increased stress on the other ties with the whipping winds tends to lead to a chain reaction of dozens of broken ties. Before long, the screen is flapping wildly in the wind and starting to tear itself to shreds. We try to catch these before they get out of hand and do any screen damage.
Why do some screens come down in the winter months? We get this question a lot. Generally, near the end of the nice fall weather, we typically take the six best screens and make sure they are on the north side of each court. We then take down and store or, if they are at their end of life, discard the screens on the south side. This is done to minimize the amount of shadow tracking across the south end of the courts with the sun sitting low in the southern sky. This has a huge benefit in speeding up the drying of wet, slushy courts and facilitates snow removal. With screens in place, we’d be dealing with a lot of ice and snow on the shady south end of each court, significantly reducing the playability of the courts in the winter months. It can be somewhat of a visibility challenge to play without the screens on that end, but it’s worth it to get some winter court time!
This season, we have procured four new wind screens for courts 1-4. Court 2 is complete; court 1 will be next up, and courts 3 and 4 will follow.
