Kooyong

Kooyong was formed in 1892 as the Lawn Tennis Association of Victoria, taking over the running of the game in the colony from the Melbourne Cricket Club, and it administered tennis in Victoria until 1987. Its stadium opened in 1927, the year the national championships were first played there, and the ground became the focus of Australian tennis for much of the century.

After the Second World War Kooyong staged seven Davis Cup Challenge Rounds. The best remembered came in 1953, when the teenagers Lew Hoad and Ken Rosewall beat Tony Trabert and Vic Seixas of the United States, and Pat Cash won both his singles in the 1986 final against Sweden. From 1972 the Australian Open was played here every year, and in 1987 the national titles were decided on the Kooyong grass centre court for the last time before the move to the hard courts of Flinders Park.

The stadium is now a hard court, used each January for the Kooyong Classic, but grass has not left the club. Its members play on twenty-six grass courts, couch grass laid out in six banks, beside twenty-two en tout cas courts. In March 2016 a portable grass court was laid in the stadium for a Davis Cup tie against the United States, the first grass meeting of the two nations at Kooyong since 1993.