Ask the Experts - Lighting Tennis Applications featuring WiLL's Jake and Jordan

Introduction

Adam: Cool. So, tennis court
applications. Jordan, when a customer comes to you, or a sales partner comes to
you and says, we want to light up a tennis court — what's the first thing that
comes to mind? How do you start that opportunity or start that project?

Jordan: Yeah, I mean, typically I'm
asking what kind of application, what kind of tennis court it is, where it is
located, because that's going to dictate most things going forward, and how I
give that information to Jake then — because he needs to know, is it in a
neighborhood, is it in its own complex, is it at a school, what kind of school
is it? So typically the first thing I'll say is, do you have an address that I
can look at?

Indoor vs. Outdoor

Adam: So indoor versus outdoor. And
then also, on the outdoor side, how do we approach a new installation versus a
retrofit? What percentage of jobs that come to us would you guys see as new
installation versus retrofit?

Jordan: That's a good question. I
think it's probably 50-50 at this point — maybe a little bit more towards
retrofits at this very second, at least, off the top of my head. As far as
retrofits, what we would look for is what the court currently looks like. Obviously,
if you're retrofitting a job, the court's already there. Sometimes they're
redoing the surface, but most of the time everything's in place — all the
infrastructure — so we kind of have to work within the parameters of what's out
there now. We need to know pole height, if they're using the same poles, what
the poles currently look like, what the current fixtures look like, if they're
floodlights versus side-mounted fixtures. We'll typically try to stay with
whatever style they currently have. So if they have floods out there, we'll
typically try to stay with a flood light, or go to a side-mounted if they need
extra cutoff. If they have cutoff, we're obviously not going to give them a
flood light where they're going to be blasting their neighbors and people might
complain. So those are just the first things that we typically look at.

Adam: One thing I learned from a job
fairly recently is, hey, how does that fixture actually mount to the pole? It
was a retrofit job as well. We had a universal tenon adapter and it wasn't so
universal at the time. Obviously we had to make some modifications.

Jake: Yeah, absolutely.

Mounting Applications

Adam: I think that's the interesting
thing about tennis. Tennis applications, I don't think, were as dominated by
one manufacturer over the last few decades, so you have a variety of pole and
bracket installations. The mechanical ability to adjust to the needs of a
specific application is pretty important, especially for retrofits, because a
lot of the pole infrastructure is in decent shape. The loads from an EPA
standpoint and weight standpoint are typically going down with an LED
application, so a lot of owners and end users want to reuse those materials.
But adapting our fixture to the existing pole and bracket — it comes in a
variety of shapes and sizes. From a mounting standpoint, we see mast arms or
spoke brackets. What other types of mounting applications do you guys see?

Jake: Tennis courts cover everything.
It can be anything from a bullhorn, they can be directly side-mounted on a
standard six-inch arm, like you mentioned. We see a lot of spokes and upsweep
style arms — those are probably the most common. Acres come into play once in a
while. I don't know, Jordan, if you've seen any other crazy arms.

Jordan: It depends on the pole height.
Tennis courts are one of those applications where there's so much variety out
in the world. You literally could see anything — it's kind of like a parking
lot. You could see literally anything in a parking lot. Yeah, and when you say
upsweep, typically referred to as davit within tennis, it brings in more
considerations for how our new fixture is going to mate to that existing pole.

Adam: Gotcha.

Indoor Applications

Adam: On the indoor side of things, do
we see more direct or indirect applications?

Jake: It's also a good question. I
would probably say it's 50-50. It's close. It probably leans more towards
indirect for indoor tennis. Tennis is an interesting one — it depends a lot on
the facility and what else they're using it for. But if it's primarily a tennis
facility, it's probably going to be indirect. If it's a new facility — if it's
a retrofit, there's a chance that it could be direct, but it all depends on
mounting heights and things like that. There are a lot of variables, but for
the most part, it's indirect.

Jordan: I think the only time we're
seeing a lot more direct is down in the southern states. They have half-covered
facilities, and in those instances, we are doing some indirect ones — we
actually have a job going right now that is indirect. But we're also seeing,
when they're multi-use — basketball, volleyball, things like that — in that
case, you're actually missing some of the walls.

Mixed Use & Pickleball

Adam: So indirect is less effective.

Jake: It's a little less ideal,
because you lose a lot of light coming out of the walls where the walls should
be.

Adam: Mixed use — you mentioned
basketball, pickleball. The last few years, pickleball is just exploding. We've
done some indoor pickleball jobs, and we also see a lot of existing tennis
courts that are being retrofitted to pickleball. So what does that look like
from a lighting design standpoint? If somebody's taking an old tennis court and
they want to add pickleball to it, what are some of the application
considerations?

Jake: It doesn't change a ton. We will
typically stick to — per the IES standards, the lighting standards we follow
for all sports stuff — they do list pickleball kind of as a sub-category under
tennis. So the foot-candles that you're supposed to go for are the same for
tennis and pickleball. It's basically just a little bit of a smaller court. If
it is a facility specific to pickleball, we'll do somewhat smaller of a calc
zone just because the court's smaller. But honestly, the design part doesn't
change too, too much from an actual tennis facility. It varies a little bit in
backyard pickleball circumstances — there are a lot of times where you're only
using one or two poles for something like that. When it gets to more
recreational, you're using two to four, sometimes more, depending on the number
of courts in a certain arrangement. As far as the differences between the two,
there's not a huge difference. The biggest difference would just be the
calc-point placements is a little different from a design standpoint. So that's
really the only thing that I've noticed, at least on the engineering side, the
design side.

Jordan: Yeah, same for me.

SLX: Budget-Conscious Applications

Adam: So Jordan, if we look at the
Wisconsin Lighting Lab products and capabilities, oftentimes we're using the
SLX, the GTX, the KBX, and the HSX for tennis. Those products get used for
other applications as well, but if we go through each one — when would you
recommend, or work with apps to use, the SLX? What would that type of
application look like?

Jordan: I really enjoy the fact that
we have tier-one and tier-two product levels. If someone wants to just get into
it, doesn't have an Olympic-level facility, we have fixtures for that. Then if
we have the higher energy, we have those. So with the SLX, it's going to be the
more budget-minded, lower mount heights — I'll say that because it is a static
fixture, as Jake and I would say. It's mounted at zero degrees, it's a
full-cutoff fixture, not different than a directional fixture. Anything 25 feet
generally or lower, we're going to use something like that. It's very
budget-conscious. We seem to use that one a lot too for pickleball, of course,
or smaller applications, or even crazy end-user houses and things like that,
where they have it in the backyard.

Adam: I would completely agree. It's a
nice — contractors are used to working with products like that. It's got
standard — standard pole mounts, slip-fitter mounts, trunnion mounts, looks
like an area light. And we've got what, eight or nine different optical packages
in that one? So that's a great way to get in the game.

GTX: Higher Output, Taller Mount Heights

Adam: GTX — you've used GTX in a few
applications. Where would you use that one?

Jordan: Same sort of thing. It's just
— generally taller mount heights, higher outputs, things like that. So
typically if we're looking for 20 or 30 foot-candles — 30 is generally the
lowest that the IES will recommend, but I think the biggest thing is light quality
is much more important than actual light levels. If we can light this
recreational backyard court phenomenally at 20 foot-candles, we're going to do
that every day. When you step up to 30 and 50 foot-candles, we're in the GT,
because the output and the optical abilities that we have from that fixture...

Glare

Adam: Is glare as much of an issue
with tennis if the poles are placed properly, or is it still an issue
regardless of pole placement?

Jake: It is kind of an issue all the
time with tennis, just because generally the poles aren't super tall. It
depends on the facility a little bit, but you never want to put poles directly
behind where people are serving and hitting from. That's why you oftentimes see
them on the sides. There are exceptions — you can always go higher poles behind
the hitters, the serving area, to kind of offset that, but it's not necessarily
ideal. We haven't had any real big complaints about glare, especially if it's a
static side-mounted fixture, full cutoff — you're not going to see too many
issues. The issues, when you do run into them, it's typically if you're running
a 16- to 20-foot pole and your fixture is tipped up at a 45-degree angle and
you have a Type 5 optic on there, and you're kind of just trying to flood the
area like you would maybe just a general flood on a parking lot. That's where
you would run into any type of glare issues. We do see that somewhat often for
backyard sports projects, and the customers are always aware that there is that
trade-off. There's a trade-off of using a Type 5 optic and tilting it versus
using something static-mounted and a little bit taller of a pole. There's just
a glare trade-off, it just is what it is. They're always aware of that — our
sales team is good about making them aware of that. If it's side-mounted, glare
is never really an issue.

HSX: Classic Sports Lighter Aesthetic

Adam: Cool. Then we have two more
product families that are pretty common for tennis — one is the HSX, one is the
KBX. The HSX is used a lot when it's replacing other fixtures that look like
the HSX, other sports lighters. That fixture has the aesthetic of your classic
sports lighter — people really like the aesthetic of that one. Mounting options
are very common. Where else would we use the HSX?

Jake: We have used them — I've seen
them used in some indirect lighting applications. I don't know if that's
necessarily something that we would do with our HSX, but it is potential. A lot
of times when you're working with HSX, it's going to be larger facilities, two
to four courts, probably maybe even more than that, where you're working with
40- to 60-foot poles. The poles are up and out of the way of people's vision,
and the light source is going to be — it's called a flood application.

Adam: Yeah, it's more like a typical
sports application at that point. You could compare it to a football field.
Obviously it's not going to be as big as a football field, but it's a smaller
version of that.

Jake: That's where you're running into
where the HSX and then even the KBX would be used — which would be the next
tier up basically.

KBX & Remote Power

Adam: And then Jordan, with the KBX —
I know Jared did a job in Pennsylvania over the summer, looked really, really
nice. I think it was a retrofit, with new poles, new KB6's, to light it to 50
foot-candles.

Jordan: Yeah, we've got a really nice
brochure for that. That particular job, I think, was 5700 Kelvin, 80 CRI. Just
the court — it really looked nice.

Adam: With the KBX, we do get requests
for remote power for tennis applications. What does the decision tree look like
when a tennis application comes in, it's a higher class, they're considering
maybe controls, considering possibly remote power? What goes through your head
when you're helping the customer out?

Jordan: Once we get to the higher
mount heights, obviously the IES has great recommendations for those things.
But we're also just looking at — if you keep them low down, they're more in the
player's line of sight. So if we get them up tall, we use directional lighting,
we really come down on it and it floods the entire area with light, creating
that vertical foot-candle as well, which broadcast and those types of
applications viewers love to see. Same thing with the CRI — it helps with those
as we go up in the levels. So the decision tree is — hey, I want to ask you,
what are your needs from a product standpoint? Because more than anything, I
don't want to start with price. If you described your ideal car and it ends up
being a Ferrari, well, maybe you need a Ferrari. But you want to understand
their application, because we do have options and solutions where other
manufacturers might have one-size-fits-all.

Adam: Price is one of the
considerations, not the only one.

Jordan: Exactly. When we're looking
at, you know, if we had 50-foot poles and they wanted a 60,000-lumen fixture,
well, we have the HSX or we have the KBX. So now I'm going to ask that question
and say, hey, do you want more controls on your product, and do you want to be
able to easily service them at a lower distance? Because a lot of these schools
and municipalities don't have a readily available lift. So that's again asking
that question and saying, hey, maybe it costs more from a material standpoint
up front, but look at the labor savings down the line.

Adam: No, that makes a lot of sense.

Light Pole Placement

Adam: We touched on it earlier — the
devil is in the fabrication details when it comes to tennis courts and
retrofits. We went through some of our product capabilities, but now on the —
Jake, your team does application engineering. You take all the incoming tennis
requests and put them into various categories, and you see what type of
capabilities we might need for a particular job. On the fabrication side of
things, do you see light poles coming up a lot as a pain point? Is it typically
just the brackets and the retrofits? We talked about lighting and brackets, but
where does the light pole fabrication side of things come in?

Jake: The only problem that we ever
run into with light poles is typically pole placement. There are a lot of
issues with pole placement specifically with tennis, because oftentimes we're
working with shorter poles, and when you have shorter poles, you typically want
them as close to the playing surface as possible. But you don't want them
directly on the court, because that's obviously a big hazard for people. So
when you have a court where there are two courts side by side, it gets a little
tricky, because in a perfect design world we would have a pole in between those
two courts, right in the middle. There's probably nothing preventing someone
from running into that pole. Or even if a contractor would have to dig up that
surface to put the pole in there, to do trenching — that creates a lot of
issues on its own. But from a design standpoint, that's like a perfect scenario
where we would potentially put a pole in between the two courts.

Custom Base Fabrication

Adam: If we have to replace an
existing pole, we have custom base fabrication. We can match existing
anchorage, in the same way we can match existing bolt patterns on the bracket
side. Have you seen applications where we raise the pole height? I guess we
won't be able to raise it, but we could potentially lower.

Jake: Yeah. I've seen some
circumstances where the anchor bolts themselves were poured directly into the
surface of the tennis court — so there was no footing, because they're trying
to keep everything as minimal as possible on the playing surface. So they'll put
a pole up and maybe wrap it with some type of padding or something. I have seen
that — the bolts were literally poured into the concrete of the playing
surface, and we had to match that. Something like that could definitely come
up, and obviously with our custom base plates, we can match pretty much
anything that would be out there. It wouldn't be too much of an issue. But
yeah, pole placement is probably the only real big thing that comes up on the
pole side of things, at least from an application standpoint.

Power Quality

Adam: So fabrication-wise, we've got
the light-pole considerations, the bracket considerations. On the lighting and
design side, we have flexible options for the customer. We can do controls,
zones, things like that. We can do remote power. Another thing that always
comes up when you are retrofitting old infrastructure is power quality. A lot
of these tennis courts could be decades old — they were designed for HID
infrastructure. LED lighting and solid-state lighting is basically a computer
at the top of the pole. With pole heights typically being a little bit lower,
there are not as many risks with power issues. But do we see it come up? Do we
see customers and contractors and our sales partners mindful of some of these
issues, or do we continue to educate them as time goes on?

Jake: It's slowly getting better, but
it's a very slow process of improving. I think contractors, end users, anyone
in the food chain — they're starting to realize what they need to do to make
sure they properly protect their investment. But it is always going to be a
struggle, especially with retrofit jobs where they have a tennis court that's
been out there for 30, 40 years. A lot of the tennis court projects that we do
are in areas like Florida, where they have the most lightning strikes in the
United States. And not that they all necessarily need to be local to that
tennis court — it doesn't have to be a direct hit, it doesn't even have to be a
hit within a mile. It could be a hit 10 miles away. So it's a difficult thing,
because the existing lights would have always been able to absorb those hits —
they just don't operate in the same manner. It is getting a little bit better,
I would say.

Maintenance & LED Expectations

Adam: With the existing lights, there
was an expectation of maintenance. With LED, for better or worse, a lot of
people have their mind made up: this is going to last forever. In certain
indoor applications, they do. We've had our LED high-bay lights at our facility
in Fond du Lac up for five years — we have never even replaced a driver. So
under the right circumstances, they will last forever. In most circumstances,
it is pretty rare to have issues with the LED lights. It's just — when there is
an issue, it seems to be a constant issue at the same time. With sports, it
gets compounded because of ease of access, or lack thereof, with the mounting
height of the poles. But as Jordan was mentioning before, having remote-power
options for some of these higher pole heights, even for tennis, could be a good
option, because the alternative is, go fix your power grid, which is likely
going to be significantly more expensive than putting drivers down near the
base of the pole.

Jordan: Yeah, I think the reason why
maybe it's taking some time to educate everybody is that if you look at the
industry, maybe you could say 80 to 85% of the industry is indoor lighting.
Those aren't the same considerations as — or even nearly the same amount of
power as — each individual outdoor fixture is. So that's been a big talking
point with our sales partners and everybody else: hey, this isn't the same
animal as a twist-in fluorescent retrofit, it's a new animal now. And to
service it, it's not a scissor lift inside of an industrial facility — it could
be a tall boom truck.

Adam: From a capability standpoint,
we've got some really nice options for people on how to protect their
investment, or if there are service events, to be there to support them. The
way that our KBX system is architected, each individual fixture and driver can
be serviced, as opposed to concentrating them in a bank of a fixture. So that
helps with service events. And if there is a power-quality audit, or if the
engineer that's specifying the job has questions, we can be a part of that too.

Jake: Yeah, for sure. And even when we
do mount fixtures at 20, 25, 30 feet — you're not going to get up there with a
ladder — it's nice that once you do get up there, it's tool-less entry. I've
seen people try, though. Once you get there, it's tool-less entry, and it's
very easy to maintain, even if you don't have that budget for onboard or
remote.

Indoor Field Houses & Mixed Use

Adam: We'll kind of end with just a
quick review of indoor. We talked a lot about outdoor. Jordan, you mentioned
that in some of the southern states like Florida, they're having kind of
mixed-use, quasi-indoor/outdoor facilities, which is cool. We see a mix of
indirect and direct. Field houses — we've done some university applications.
What's a typical mixed-use for indoor? Do they mix tennis with other sports, or
once you have courts set up on the inside, is it difficult to have mixed use?
What do you guys see for university mixed use?

Jake: They'll use a field house for
anything. Typically when we get any type of drawing of a field house, they'll
have it lined out as to what exactly is all going to be done inside the field
house. So they'll have three basketball court lines, in between that they'll
have volleyball, and inside of that they might have tennis. That's where some
of the zones and the controls and things...

Jordan: And that's the one we recently
did a layout for, was in Iowa, where there's a walking track around it. It's
the weirdest looking architectural thing — it was definitely a 50s or 60s child
of just figuring out new shapes. They're like, okay, those are the cool ones.
It was interesting. And you know, having your main basketball court, then you
had two tennis and full-length basketball courts on the side, and then in
between those they'd move the bleachers out of the way and they had volleyball.
So Jake was sitting there with like 27 different optical configurations.

Adam: It's one of those things where,
do you light the whole field house to the same foot-candles, or do you
concentrate specific areas and then use wireless controls to — like you said,
you have different scenes for every different sport? You could do it both ways.

Jake: The way that you typically would
settle on in the past, at least, is just everything is lit to the same amount
of light. If you have a field house, it's just 30 foot-candles across the whole
thing.

Adam: But now it's always on. Now
today we can do some pretty fancy things with our controls.

Different Configurations & Scenes

Adam: If the field is not variable on
the inside — if it's just mixed-use static — I would think that would lend
itself to having different configurations.

Jake: Yes. And it's one thing too
that, what we did in this Iowa facility — we were able to play around with some
different optic configurations and set up scenes in ways that were like, this
would dim 50%, this would dim a little, this would brighten, actually increase
in brightness. Then you'd have 50 foot-candles on just the basketball court,
and 20 or 10 foot-candles around the entire area — create like a stage effect
like you would typically want for some type of basketball event. We have the
capabilities to pretty much do what the end user wants us to do at this point.
It's just always trying to translate and figure out exactly what those look
like — where the focus should be.

Adam: Sometimes tough to say.

Jake: It is.

Custom Mounting Options

Adam: Well cool. So I guess one more
project that we kind of worked on — I don't think it was tennis, but it was
indoor, and there were a bunch of custom brackets and poles...

Jordan: Which one? Yeah, exactly.
That's — we talked about custom fab, metal fab, on the exterior side. But we're
seeing more and more custom fab on the interior side. If they can put up their
structure, then we can design an apparatus to hang from the ceiling and mount
our fixtures. It seems to add quite a bit of value for the engineer specifier.
We've done high-level pools that needed those brackets, and we've designed one
where they wanted — we're doing an indirect with our KBX, where we're using the
pillars. So we had to design a pillar clamp basically to mount our assemblies,
to basically make it so they didn't have to use twice the amount of hangers
over the top of the facility.

Jake: A lot of the competitors for
that specific job were coming in where they probably didn't have a good
solution for the mounting. It would have probably looked like some type of
safety chain type of thing, where they hung every single fixture down individually.
But with our custom capabilities manufacturing, we're able to do things in
groups, so it's a little bit easier on the install. We also can fan the lights
out, we can do aiming with the lights, to make sure that no spots are missed,
make use of optics.

Adam: Yeah, exactly. Concentrate the
assembly but then spread the light out.

Jake: Exactly. So it's so much easier
to service and install. It changes the game for the installation team because
they can pretty much assemble one arm — one assembly — put it up on the wall,
and then they just move on to the next one. It's not constant, it's not putting
20 individual fixtures up — it's four groups of fixtures of five. So it helps a
lot.

Adam: Cool. Well, thank you very much
guys.

Jordan: Thank you.

Jake: Thank you. Good talking, man.

Adam: Absolutely.