The Grass Court Season

Danye

What with Queens being on TV at the minute im watching a lot of it, but I have heard the commentators making few passing refrences to "the grass court season" with the exception of Queens, Wimbeldon and one in Nottingham I think?.....what other tournament(s) are played on grass?

And are they off any major significance? Thanks

juvenal

Unfortunately the grass court season is the shortest on the professional calendar. Due to the high maintenance costs (compared to hard and clay courts), and the obvious issues with rain, it's the least popular surface for courts, but ironically the most prestigious GS (Wimbledon) on the calendar.

The season begins after the French Open Finals, running for only about five weeks, and for 2009 the schedule runs like this:

Week | Men's | Women's
8 June | Queen's Club (UK); Gerry Webber (Halle, Germany) | Birmingham (UK)
15 June | Ordina Open (Netherlands); Eastbourne (UK) | Ordina Open (Netherlands); Eastbourne (UK)
22 June | The Championships, Wimbledon (London, UK) | The Championships, Wimbledon (London, UK)
6 July | Hall of Fame Tennis Championships (Rhode Island, USA) | --

Regarding significance, obviously Wimbledon is the most prestigious title on either tour during the year, but apart from that, none of the other tournaments are of great significance. They exist purely as warm-up events for Wimbledon, and all the men's events are only ATP 250 tournaments (tier 4 - the bottom tier event on the ATP tour).

Just to give you an idea of the surface breakdown on the men's ATP 2009 tour, here's the number of events and their tier (ranking points available).

|Hard | Clay | Grass
GS 2000| 2 | 1 | 1
ATP World Tour Finals 1100-1500 | 1 | 0 | 0
ATP Masters 1000 | 6 | 3 | 0
ATP World Tour 500 | 8 | 3 | 0
ATP World Tour 250 | 20 | 14 | 5
total|37|21|6

You can see that grass is way down the list on the number of events per surface - so get your fix over the next couple of weeks while you can!;)