With the racket thwacking, ball bouncing and voices chattering sounds of 67 tennis students under the age of 10 as the acoustical backdrop, Angel Lopez holds forth of the state of tennis in San Diego. His conclusion is good. Darn good.

Lopez, tennis director for 22 years at the San Diego Tennis & Racquet Club, sees San Diego as part of a Southern California nation-state, a place comparable to a European country like France or Spain in its fond embrace of tennis. He credits a steady run of professional tournaments, increased college scholarships for women, general resurgence of the sport and the weather for generating enthusiasm.

“Tennis is doing very well here,” he says. “Tennis is part of culture again. It is in commercials with the Williams sisters and (Anna) Kournikova. Tennis is cool now.”

For gauging the temperature of the local tennis market, it is hard to find a better source than Lopez, who also runs the club’s Angel Lopez Tennis Academy. A San Diego native, he took up the game at 17 and quickly excelled. He starred at the University of California at San Diego and then San Diego City College (at the time a national junior college powerhouse) before earning a full scholarship to the University of Arizona.

Unable to afford a chance on the professional circuit, he returned to San Diego in 1978 where he has since excelled as a teacher. His certified master professional status from the U.S. Professional Tennis Association is given only to the top 1 percent of instructors. In 1999, he was U.S. Olympic Committee Developmental Coach of the Year. He has worked with Zina Garrison, Alexandra Stevenson and Michael Chang.

The proximity of tournaments like the Acura Classic at La Costa, the Indian Wells Tournament in the Palm Springs desert community and the Mercedes-Benz Cup at the University of California at Los Angeles makes the sport accessible. “Southern Californians can get up close and personal with famous players,” he says.

Also, while the 1970s play of Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg and others brought fans out to play the sport for a decade, those same individuals are coming back.

“That 1970s generation, that generation that stopped to raise a family, is playing again,” Lopez says.

The sport also is recognizing that schedules are busier. Now, rather than taking place over several days, local amateur tournaments often finish in one day. Instead of playing best-of-three sets, the third set can be played in a tiebreaker format.

The popularity of women’s tennis has zoomed because of the personalities on the tour where American women dominate, and because of Title 9, which required that colleges offer an equal number of scholarships to male and female athletes.

“(Tennis) is now a major sport for women,” says Lopez. “It is like football for guys.”

Finally, few climates are as hospitable as San Diego’s.

“I travel a lot and people will ask me “when is your season?,” Lopez says. “I tell them it is always tennis season because the weather is so good.”

— San Diego Metropolitan Staff