<p>Sansri is right. I did quite a bit of research last week on the state of tennis in the manhattan area and unless you plan on playing on the 3 west side courts near W Houston, you will either need to rent a court from a private club or buy a permit to use the public courts. If you choose to go with the public option, a single play ticket costs $7 for 1 hour of singles or 2 hours of doubles if I’m not mistaken. Most of the time, you have to show up early to reserve a court. You can also reserve over the internet for the Central Park courts, but I believe that carries an additional fee of $7.</p>
<p>You can also buy a season pass, which lasts from April to November 22 and costs $100 regardless of when you buy it. It technically entitles you to play one hour per day on any of the public courts but I believe you can actually play for more than 1 hr if you move to a new location. For example, at Central Park, the attendant on duty marks your permit with a permanent marker to signify that you’ve played there once already on that day (there’s a calendar on the back of a season pass) but I went to the Lower East Side courts at East River Park on the same day and the attendant there didn’t bother to check or mark the card again. Therefore, if you want to play longer and don’t mind moving to another location, it’s possible to play multiple times in 1 day.</p>
<p>There’s also the option of playing in one of the other boroughs. I’ve heard that many courts in Queens are relatively deserted and are not regulated or staffed by attendants, meaning you can get on without needing a permit. However, the inability to get there and back in a reasonable amount of time becomes a huge issue, at least for me.</p>
<p>In my opinion, manhattan is probably the least tennis-friendly location that I’ve ever lived in. You have to be pretty devoted to tennis in order to tolerate the way they do things here. In addition, NYU is not exactly fanatical about its sports, which means that most people here care even less about tennis. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of people I saw carrying tennis racquets during all of freshman year. There are a couple of websites where tennis players can look for people to play with, and so far this year, I’ve relied almost exclusively on these sites. The problem is that there is a relatively small number of experienced players around manhattan (which I believe is a result of the inadequate public tennis system) so it is rather difficult to find people to play with, particularly if you’re around the 4.0-4.5 level or above.</p>