subject: Case Study: Tennis Court Lighting Project In Santa Ana, California [print this page] In Santa Ana, CA, there was a landscape lighting professional who often worked in lighting home sports courts. One project involved creating a custom tennis court lighting system for a special home sport court. This court was a multipurpose gaming area. .
Like many custom courts of its kind found all over the United States. It provided a play area for more than one type of game. It consisted not only of a tennis court, but also had a half-court basketball court built into it.
The landscape developer went online and contacted a lighting supply company with whom he often does business. This is routine for him, because this particular company he uses provides him with many different options in athletic lighting or landscape lighting equipment, This equipment is exclusively American made, and it is warranted at the highest level of quality of assurance.
In this particular project, the landscape designers client was a rather wealthy individual who had already informed the designer that money was not an issue. Instead, he simply wanted the best possible tennis court lights he could obtain. This liberated the equipment vendor from the constraint of having to work within a budget that may have possibly minimized the quality of the system recommendeded.
In most instances, the lighting supply vendor would have done an extensive photometric analysis of the court in order to recommend the best possible fixtures, along with the optimal arrangements of those lights.
This was not necessary, however, because the landscaper already knew what his client needed. All the equipment had to provide him with was some basic information on fixture type and a general rundown on how to best position these lights once he received them.
While there were not any strict dark sky laws to deal with in this particular neighborhood, both the vendor of the equipment and the landscaper felt it best to recommend a custom tennis court lighting kit and lighting fixture layout that would contain the light within the boundaries of the court. This was done out of courtesy to the neighbors, not out of necessity.
The developers ultimately devised a system that consisted of seven poles total, with 1000 watt fixtures on each pole. Six poles were dedicated to lighting the tennis court itself. The seventh pole was smaller than the other six and served to illuminate the half-court basketball court.
As this case study demonstrates, tennis court lighting systems are almost always customized to some special environmental requirement. Even the simplest of projects will often feature something unique that requires special accommodation. In the case of this particular client, the professionals involved were lighting a sports court that is designed exclusively for residential use and is intended to be multifunctional in purpose.
There are not prepackaged lighting systems for such courts because each one of these home athletic facilities is customized to the individual athletic pursuits of the homeowner. Tennis court lights, basketball lights, volleyball lights, and other special luminaries must often be combined in very unique configurations in order to provide the homeowner with the optimal foot candle spread, glare shielding, and light pollution control.
