“All these facilities cost money to maintain,” Wentzell says. “There’s nothing sinister about it, its just real world economics.”

He says earning money by renting the courts has been part of athletic department philosophy for “ten or fifteen years.”

“A Privilege and Not a Right”

Friction between the athletic department and the club tennis team has a precedent.

Robert C. Higgins ’03, who captained the team before Birbaum and Gest, says the athletic department would often cancel the team’s practices at short notice and would tell him that the space was needed for various varsity uses.

Higgins says the athletic department made no effort to find a make-up time for the team.

“A number of times during our scheduled practice they told us that there was another event happening in Gordon and they really made no effort to provide us with other court space,” Higgins says.

In October of 2000, the men’s and women’s club teams divided their regular 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. practice time in the Gordon Indoor Track and Tennis facility on Sunday mornings.

According to Birnbaum, since so many people have religious conflicts on Sunday mornings, it is difficult to run a team when the Sunday morning slot is the only one available all week.

Last year, Andrea L. Tsai ’03, a former captain of the women’s team, sent an e-mail message to David Fish, the men’s varsity tennis coach, asking for a different time.

Fish, however, wrote back to Tsai that he was “disturbed” to hear that the club teams were not willing to practice at 10 a.m. on Sundays. He wrote that “it doesn’t portray Harvard club tennis players in a very good light if they aren’t willing to get up for the opportunity to get free indoor court time.”

Fish encouraged the club teams to accept the 10 a.m. time, writing that he regarded “indoor tennis in the northeast as a privilege and not a right.”

Fish could not be reached for comment for this story.

When Birnbaum and Gest assumed the club team’s captaincy last spring, they say their first priority was to overcome the problem of court time, and they arranged a meeting with Jeremy L. Gibson, the athletic department’s assistant director of athletics for operations.

In that meeting, the two asked for better options than the two hours on Sunday mornings in Gordon.