Tennis coach Craig Jones sold the former Petersburg Racquet Club to The Columbia County Board of Commissioners for $1.5 million in April.
It reopened under its new name, The Columbia County Racquet Center, last month.
Although his parents met on a tennis court, Jones said buying a tennis club was never part of his life plan.
“I used to get dragged to the tennis courts back then,” he said. “I’d go to the city courts and bang balls against the fence.”
Jones said he got serious about tennis around the age of 14. He was too short for basketball his freshman year but was the best in his grade at tennis, he said.
“From there, it exploded for me,” Jones said.
He started teaching tennis after high school. Upon earning his international studies degree from Rhodes College in Memphis, he became the director of tennis at Houndslake Country Club in Aiken at age 24.
In 1997, when word spread among staff that the country club was being sold and positions would be cut, Jones started to look for a new teaching position and learned that Petersburg Racquet Club had lost its pro coach.
But Jones didn’t want to end up in a similar position, with the threat of a closure looming above him.
Over the course of about seven months, Jones, who was 35 at the time, went from talking about taking on the coaching role to borrowing money to buy the club.
“I don’t think [the owner] intended to sell it, and I didn’t intend to buy it,” he said. “But at Houndslake, I wasn’t controlling my destiny. I didn’t want that again. I bought it for security and to be my own boss.”
Jones said he remembers the first night he had the keys to Petersburg, looking out over the courts and thinking, “I finally did it.”
Twenty-five years later, he’s sold it to the county and says it’s the best possible thing he could have done.
“When we sold to the county, I feel we left a legacy,” he said. “We gave it to someone who would let it stay a tennis center and had the funds to take it to another level.”
The county’s most significant update is replacing the pool area with pickleball courts due to growing demand for the sport that took off on a new level during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jones said he had been quietly looking to sell the club for a while because he’s been working at the United States Tennis Association since 2011, with his wife taking over much of his duties at the racquet club. He’s now USTA’s senior director of education, training and resources and travels a lot, meaning he needed to either leave the USTA or sell the club, he said.
A couple of offers came in before the county approached him, he said.
“It was the fastest sale,” he said. “I think it took 10 weeks.”
Jones says it’s been “bittersweet” to hand the keys over but said he’s proud of its growth considering Augusta is a golf community, not a tennis community.
“That was a struggle to get enough members to survive on your own,” he said. “If it was in Charlotte or Atlanta, it would be turning down members.”
Owning a racquet club is a tough business but it was always about a love for tennis, not the money, he said.
“If people made a lot of money on racquet clubs, there’d be more of them,” he said. “There’s very few of us left.”
