About Us
At Wallace Park Indoor Tennis Centre, our aim is to provide facilities and training so all our players can develop good technique and improve through coaching, practice & competitive play at their level.
Wallace HS & Wallace Park both have hard courts. Hard courts are the ‘slowest’ surface available in Northern Ireland and are much better for developing good technique than ‘fast’ artificial grass courts.
The majority of the world’s best players learned on clay. This is because it is a ‘slow’ surface on which players have longer rallies and hence develop better technique. Clay courts, however, are very difficult to maintain in our climate. Hard courts are the ‘slowest courts’ we have and therefore the best for developing players.
Our History
In 1994 Tennis Fundamentals was founded as a business taking mini tennis into primary schools. By 2004 we were teaching 2,000 children each spring at 18 venues around N. Ireland.
At that time the government announced an ‘Elite Facilities Fund’ to build £53m of facilities for Olympic sports in N. Ireland as a legacy from the London 2012 Olympics. We put together an application for a ‘Centre of Excellence for Tennis in N. Ireland’ to be built at a new hotel and golf course planned for a site adjacent to the A1 in Hillsborough.
After six years of work and £50k spent on the required architect drawings, planning permission, sports development plans etc. the project was chosen to receive £3.5m of the funding as one of six successful projects to be funded. The business plan showed that the facility would not be sustainable unless run by a charity that was exempt from VAT. ‘The Schools Tennis Project Ltd.’ was therefore established as a charity in 2004. In 2008 the funding was withdrawn due to the worldwide financial crisis. Only the Olympic sized swimming pool in Bangor received funding.
On the back of the plans which were in place Lisburn City Council, as it was then, were persuaded to build ‘Wallace Park Indoor Tennis Centre’ which ‘The Schools Tennis Project Ltd.’ has run on their behalf since it opened in 2011. A new ‘Rocklyn’ dome was built by Lisburn & Castlereagh City Council in 2018 when the initial ‘Covair’ dome was destroyed in a storm.
With a successful coaching programme in place at ‘Wallace Park Indoor Tennis Centre’ we are now working with local schools to upgrade their facilities as a venue for ‘Lisburn Tennis Club’ where our players can get involved in club play, league matches, tournaments etc.
