Saturdays in October are some of the busiest days of the year for the nexus of the Byrd Park Little League fields and tennis courts. People of all ages from around Richmond share a dozen courts just a few feet from earnest parents watching 5-year-olds play in the dirt.

This should be the happy coda for what was once a set of segregated facilities that forbade a young Arthur Ashe, Jr. from playing there. And the bustle is only part of what makes this sports spot so busy — a field across the street at Lois Harrison-Jones Elementary is now used for soccer organized by school parents.

These parents transform LHJ’s massive yard into lines and goal posts, with nothing sitting there permanently. They make it work.

I was sitting at the LHJ playground recently when I first heard about The Proposal: A nominally nonprofit group would build an eight-court indoor tennis facility that would cover the ’empty’ soccer lot, paved parking included. Sitting just a few feet from a dozen tennis courts, it sounded too absurd to be true.

It is Richmond Real. The promise, from Ashe’s nephew David Harris, Jr. and Richmond Tennis Association’s Irv Cantor: Give Second Serve RVA a lease to build its own tennis facility, and it will offer programming to underserved Richmond youth and house a Black Tennis Hall of Fame — and be a place for decidedly well-served Richmond Tennis Association members to play. The group has also promised to resurface courts at nine RPS schools.

The opposition from fellow LHJ parents has been overwhelming. There has been a petition, there has been canvassing. There is a website. They are Richmond Real Pissed Off.

”Current LHJ caregivers” are invited to meet with RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras on Wednesday, Nov. 12. Second Serve has presented to the local neighborhood association. There has been no public forum announced.

Why would RPS administrators let this proposal go this far? I asked RPS to send me communications between Second Serve RVA and administrators. There is coordination, but not collaboration, evident from RPS in the emails provided. It does not seem enthusiastic.

The documents also show Cantor emailed plans attempting to address parent concern: An overlay of a soccer field that would remove a current baseball field and add another, plus batting cages; as if this school’s property is his personal sandbox. As if baseball and soccer schedules wouldn’t be in conflict. This is still more Richmond Real that will be pitched as active listening. 

Later, as I sat in the parking line for one of the final Flying Squirrels games at the soon-to-be-demolished Diamond, it hit me. There’s the Arthur Ashe Center. The RPS-owned building where the legend himself attended its opening ceremony in 1982, and the site of his funeral in 1993. The Arthur Ashe Center where kids are supposed to be able to play tennis indoors.

Anyone could tell you that, like the Diamond, it has fallen into despair, and nobody would assert that RPS had the funds to keep up with it. But the fact remains that it was a publicly owned resource that has been slated for vanishment to make way for private development.

The soon-to-be-scrapped heap of the Arthur Ashe Center reminded me that I asked RPS for plans for that building in 2023. There was nothing.

Nothing from anybody asking for just a sliver of Arthur Ashe’s legacy to be preserved for the purpose it was intended. No documents from any RPS official planning to raise hell, to get something for these kids.

What we have so far is more Richmond Real, including a nearby (but not technically connected) condo plot named The Ace, in “honor” of Arthur Ashe. That’s the Richmond we are slouching toward when you and I were too busy to demand RPS have a meaningful seat at the table in any Diamond District planning.

So I asked Kamras again, as I did in 2019, what the deal was.

His answer, six years later, remains terse: “[W]e have not yet initiated discussions with the City about replacement spaces; and 2) the City now owns the Ashe Center (we surplussed it to them a year or so ago) so I would defer all questions about that property to them.”

I have a counter full of water jugs worth of questions for them. But the answer seems clear: If they wanted to, they would.

When the demolition of the Arthur Ashe Center begins, there will be no reverse ribbon cutting to claim credit for destroying a place where children played. What we have to show for it is a beautiful rendering from a design firm offering envisioning a revitalized Arthur Ashe Center that would serve “as a vital hub for Richmond Public Schools and a platform for local artists.”

Beautiful. We can sit here waiting for that to show up in the renderings on the Diamond District website. We can ask why it wasn’t table stakes for development partners. But what was lost in the Arthur Ashe Center — a place for kids to play — we can find elsewhere right now. Diana Mathews has such an idea.

A PTA board member at Chimborazo Elementary, she and other parents grew tired of upper-grade students having to play on a sad set of what could generously be called workout equipment, sitting flush to the road. They rely on careful driving from the parent drop-off line to avoid tragedy.

Like LHJ, Chimborazo is a Title 1 school. And like LHJ, Chimborazo has building needs that mean play equipment is last on the list of considerations. Mathews helped spearhead a funding effort for a new playground that went viral, with more than $120,000 raised so far and a groundbreaking planned for June 2026.

“These kids work so hard,” Mathews said. “They‘ve proven themselves time and again. What is the one reward elementary kids look forward to during the day? Recess. Can that not just be safe, as a baseline?

“They are making it work,” she adds. “But it shouldn’t be another brain exercise to have to figure out how to safely play.”

Making it work. That’s what parents are supposed to be doing. That’s what our RPS administrators are supposed to be doing for us.

Tom Nash is a former Style Weekly reporter and proxy for FOIA nonprofit MuckRock (https://www.muckrock.com/). He shares writing duties for the On Parenting column with his wife, Catherine MacDonald, a gerontologist who studies growing up in modern society as part of her job at Virginia Commonwealth University (though her views do not represent her employer).