 The Bemidji Area Tennis Association's mission is to promote and develop the growth of tennis in the Bemidji area. But as sports director AJ Feldman shows us, the group hopes that in the near future they'll be able to grow the sport year-round. Tennis is one of the few sports that you can play throughout your entire life and the Bemidji Area Tennis Association encourages participation no matter how long you've played or how good you are. You've been playing about five or six years now so started a little bit later in life but love the game. Like I said, great bunch of people and a lot of fun so. I've hit with four-year-old kids that can barely hold a racket and you know we have very high quality players that are in USTA terms 4.5 to 5.0 players in town and everybody in between so they're all skill levels and you know we want to provide the resources for people to to learn tennis and get better. It's just one of the many organizations in town encouraging people to stay active. Keeps me moving gives me some exercise and there's a little bit of competition which is fun fun competition but it's good. In order to extend the season to a year-round one the association is working on building an indoor tennis only facility. It's already purchased the land and secured over half a million dollars in funding. I think it'd be important to get people playing year-round and to be able to do that for the exercise for consistency. You know honestly we've just got a lot of people that would like to continue to play more and there's a lack of accessibility of indoor tennis time in Bemidji so that's where the need comes comes from. Whether it's indoors, outdoors, you can expect tennis in Bemidji to keep on growing. It's just great to see the organization keep growing. I hope it keeps growing and growing because it's a lot of fun good exercise, good people, good clean fun. Reporting in Bemidji, AJ Feldman, Lakeland News. You can learn more about their fundraising efforts by visiting our website at lptv.org. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.