Here’s a trick that will produce a map on your computer screen that designates tennis related venues, including clubs, courts, tennis organizations and tennis related businesses in the DC metro area. You may be amazed at the variety and quantity, and you can have fun locating your favorite tennis facilities.
Go to www.google.com and click on “maps” in the navigation bar at the top of the page. If you don’t have a default location from past use of Google Maps, on the right side of your screen you should get a map of North America or other large area, depending on where you and your computer or other device are currently working. If you do have a default location, you should get a map centered on that location. In any case, to the left of your screen you should be presented with the option of choosing or changing your default location.
The default location is easily changed, and to get results centered on the city of Washington, DC, set that city as your default. If you prefer, you can choose another city as your default. This is not critical, since once your map appears, you can use directional arrows on the map to move and expand the area of the map in different directions.
If you choose a location other than Washington, DC as your default, be careful to include the correct state of the city you want to be your default. For example, when I typed in ‘Newington’ as a default and quickly clicked “save,” I ended up with a map centered on Newington, CT, rather than on the Newington, VA that I wanted. Once you have the correct default location, click ‘save’ and a map centered on that default will be to the right of your screen.
Type the word ‘tennis’ in the Google search box and click on the ‘search’ icon. Voilà, the map on your screen will have links to tennis locations and venues. To the left of the screen will be a list of addresses, phone numbers and web pages of tennis venues and businesses.
For example the list to the left of my screen started with the East Potomac Tennis Center, Drilling Tennis and Golf, Tennis Factory, Arlington YMCA Tennis and Washington Kastles Stadium.
You can click an arrow to hide that left panel to get a wide screen view of the map.
I had been thinking of starting a series of profiles of tennis venues and resources in the metro area for some time when Julia Schaumburg, web master at the McLean Racquet and Health Club in McLean, VA, emailed a request to be featured on the DC tennis examiner page and on www.novatennis.com.
For fun, I held my cursor over one of the small dots in the McLean area on my map and got a popup that this was the site of the “McLean Racquet and Health Club.” A click on the dot, revealed the address, phone number and webpage. Clicking on the name of the racquet club brought up a page in my browser with brief information about the club and the option to click on ‘Directions.’ Exercising the option produced a map and directions to the club.
I plan to make an appointment with Schaumburg to visit her club and to make it the subject of the first in a series on DC metro tennis venues.
If you have a club or tennis venue that you would like me to visit and profile, let me know by using the ‘Add comment’ box at the top of this column, or contact me at Joe Hight.
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