How a Club Gets Drawn

What does a club need?

Its courts, each traced as an outline.

A tennis court in OpenStreetMap is an area tagged leisure=pitch and sport=tennis, traced round the court's edge. That outline is everything we measure: its length, its width and the bearing it was built on. A ref tag gives the court its number on the gate, and a surface tag says what it is made of. Paths, trees, fences and buildings fill in the drawing round it.

The Club prints from 2 courts. The Court and The Match print from 1. The studio counts them before any price.

Why won't my club print?

Because its courts are mapped only as points, or not at all.

A court mapped as a single point says a court is there and nothing about its size or its angle, so there is nothing to measure. The studio shows how many courts it found with an outline and how many only as points, so you can see which. We refuse rather than guess: a court we can't measure is a court we'd be inventing, and that's the one thing this print exists not to do. If your club isn't mapped yet, leave its name and your email in the studio, and we write once it can be drawn.

Why does the studio ask what the courts are made of?

Most clubs don't record what their courts are made of, so we ask you. About one court in seven on the map carries a surface tag. The studio asks once for every court the map leaves blank, and lets you change any court on its own: a club with clay courts and two hard ones should print that way.

How do I add the missing courts?

With a free OpenStreetMap account and the editor in your browser.

• Read the tennis page on the OpenStreetMap wiki, which sets out the tags a court uses.
• Open your club at openstreetmap.org, sign in, and press Edit.
• Trace each court round its outer lines as an area, and tag it leisure=pitch and sport=tennis. Add ref= with its number, and surface= if you know it: clay, hard, grass or acrylic.
• Save with a short note on what you added. Overpass, where this studio reads the courts, takes minutely updates from OpenStreetMap, so your edit is usually here within minutes.

Map only what you know or can see in the editor's imagery, and never copy from another map or a club's own plan: OpenStreetMap accepts only data its contributors are free to give.

What if a court is traced with its run-off?

Some mappers trace the whole fenced area round a court, run-off and all. When an outline is more than 1 m larger than the ITF's 23.77 × 10.97 m, we draw the regulation lines centred inside it rather than stretch them to fit, and the courts table in the studio says so for that court.

Why does the print carry a date?

Because the data changes. A print states the day its courts were read, so the drawing on your wall is a record of the club as its mappers had it then.