LOS ANGELES — On his first date with Carol “Lulu” Kimmelman, Doug Kimmelman suggested they play tennis, because he’d been taking lessons.
That was 1989, and back then, Kimmelman had no idea of what she had accomplished six years earlier at USC. So they strolled down the block to a court, only for Kimmelman to come up gasping and slick with sweat 20 minutes in and see his soon-to-be-wife completely unbothered. She hadn’t moved an inch, he remembered.
Tennis was one of Lulu’s lifelong passions, her husband would soon come to learn. She was a member of the Trojans’ 1983 national champion women’s tennis team. Education was the other passion. She was a longtime teacher at Raymond Avenue Elementary in South Los Angeles, with a particular goal of working with underserved children. After she died at age 53 in 2017 of ovarian cancer, Kimmelman and his kids set into motion a plan to honor her with a sprawling community center based in Los Angeles, with tennis courts and other sports facilities that would be readily available to the city’s youth.
“How do we get the convergence of tennis and education?” Kimmelman asked on Wednesday afternoon, speaking in front of a crowd of constituents personal and political who had come, in a way, to support his late wife. “So, look behind me.”
With a groundbreaking Wednesday at a 31-acre site in Playa del Rey, located adjacent to St. Bernard High and LAX, construction has officially begun on “Lulu’s Place,” a $150 million center for athletics and education that will honor the former USC star. With plans to be completed by 2026, the design for the grounds includes a variety of tennis and pickleball courts, soccer fields, basketball and volleyball courts, a dog park and more, all intended to boost recreational opportunities for a wide range of nearby schools in Los Angeles.
It’s taken seven long years to get the project over the hump, largely thanks to the lack of available land in Los Angeles. Originally, the proposal targeted a lot in Carson, but Kimmelman pivoted after deeming that area “too challenging,” he said, due to environmental concerns. In May 2022, the Kimmelman Family Foundation reached out to LAWA to place a bid toward developing a campus on a stretch of land on the LAX Northside.
Since then, in addition to funding from Kimmelman himself, longtime owner of private equity firm Energy Capital Partners, Kimmelman’s team has brought on a wide range of donors for Lulu’s Place: Disney, Tiger Woods’ TGR Foundation, and Clippers president Steve Ballmer’s Ballmer Group, among others. Mayor Karen Bass took to a podium at the groundbreaking site Wednesday to declare that the city was “very proud to be a partner,” and members of the LAWA and Bishop Matthew Gregory Elshoff delivered their own comments endorsing the project.
“Pull God, the city and the airport together and you’ve got the perfect parcel,” L.A. County Supervisor Holly Mitchell told the Southern California News Group on Wednesday afternoon.
It is, of course, not completely perfect. Many community members are concerned with how the noise and field lights, and increased traffic, will impact nearby residential areas, with one Playa del Rey resident writing in a public comment to the Los Angeles City Council that it was a “grave disservice to the local residents of Playa del Rey.”
Advocates like Los Angeles Unified School District board member Nick Melvoin, though, emphasize that there’s a significant need in the area for the campus, citing the accessibility for thousands of students to simply be able to walk to Lulu’s Place after school and have free access to sports facilities and low-cost educational programs. Additionally, United States Tennis Association CEO Lew Sherr established that Lulu’s Place would become the “new West Coast player development home” for the USTA.
At the end of the day, though, behind a massive conglomerate of political and corporate power, it was simply Kimmelman’s way to “honor his bride,” as Mitchell put it.
“We want to honor her legacy and what was important to her,” Kimmelman told the SCNG on Wednesday, speaking of Lulu, “and what she stood for and what her values – we want those things carried on from generation to generation.”