As first reported by the Mountain View Voice, in Los Altos, some community members have no love for a parking proposal that would replace several tennis courts. This comes as the Mountain View Los Altos High School District tries to address parking issues for students, whose cars have spurred frustration from neighbors.
Last year, following community complaints, Los Altos City Council restricted parking around the high school. Since then, students and families have told the district they’ve had difficulty finding parking.
Now, the district is exploring options proposed by Quattrochi Kwok Architects that would use some of the tennis courts to create a new parking lot for students. There are several layouts the Board of Trustees reviewed at their August 18 meeting, that involved removing as few as two and as many as four tennis courts for the parking lot.
Los Altos High School has 12 tennis courts on campus, which coaches say is a point of pride in the region and allows them to host matches. The school also leaves the courts open for the community to play on when the high school teams are not playing.
“In this area, I mean, tennis is huge, and there’s not enough tennis courts,” said Edgar Marin, the Head Boy’s Varsity Tennis Coach at Los Altos High School.
Marin explained that many community members will line up to access the courts at the high school, with an especially large demand on weekend mornings and in the evenings on weekdays.
Marin added that at the school, the teams are inundated with talented students wanting to play on the teams, and because of the number of courts available, the school can have about 80 students in total playing between the boys and girls as well as varsity and junior varsity teams. Los Altos High School’s girl’s varsity team has been doing particularly well and was the runner up at state championships in 2024.
For the past several years, the coaches say four of the tennis courts have been occupied with construction and storage. The coaches had been banking on getting those courts back, so the news that those courts could instead be turned into parking spots concerned them.
“From our standpoint, like, I hate to lose it because I’m not sure how much they can gain out of parking, but in terms of tennis, it will be a big loss,” said Hung Nguyen, the Head Girl’s Varsity Tennis Coach at the school.
At a recent school board meeting on Sept. 29, parents, coaches, and students showed up to oppose this parking plan. Parents shared that parking has become more difficult to find since the city’s parking restrictions went into effect.
One community member told the board at the public comment section of that meeting “using a space that was to be returned to the tennis teams and even the community who are using those courts every week, I don’t think would be helping address the problem.”
At the tennis courts, many told NBC Bay Area they see the courts as an important community resource and don’t want to see any turned into a parking lot.
“The little bit of courts that we have that haven’t been converted to pickleball already are very valuable to us recreational tennis players,” said Kirthi Shankar, who comes from Palo Alto to play on the school’s tennis courts.
NBC Bay Area reached out to district officials for comment but have not heard back.
The board of trustees is slated to vote at their Oct. 13 meeting on whether to authorize Quattrochi Kwok Architects to do a study of the parking lot options.
Source: NBC Bay Area