While there are no official records, Salmon Arm’s first two outdoor tennis courts were built on the old J.L. Jackson Junior High School site sometime in the 1950s under the leadership of Al Bianco and Bill Ladner. In the 1970s, an informal tennis club was formed by enthusiasts including Henry Sivertz, Ken Kolkind, Shirley Lyall, Tom Brighouse and Eileen Harle. It was the start of much bigger things to come. 

In 1977, the Salmon Arm Tennis Club (SATC) was formally registered as a Society under the B.C. Societies Act. Henry Sivertz, Ken Hecker, Shirley Lyall, Sandy Lockhart, Nicholas Young and Ken Kolkind were appointed as the club’s first Directors. Using the cooperative venture between the Municipality of Burnaby and the Burnaby Tennis Club as a model, the group applied to the City of Salmon Arm to lease roughly two acres of land bordering Little Mountain Park originally used as a refuse dump. A lease was granted, a bank loan was secured and the club broke ground on four outdoor tennis courts. 

Site preparation was done by Blackburn Construction, with much of the time and cost subsidized by Lindsay Blackburn. Volunteer club members did the rest. The courts were officially opened by Mayor Lund and MLA Len Bawtree in September 1978. A year later, the existing clubhouse was completed, again by volunteer labour and with much of the building materials donated by local businesses. 

In the fall of 2010, Tennis Canada and the Tennis BC Facilities Committee issued a grant of $5,000 to SATC to study the feasibility of building an indoor tennis facility in Salmon Arm. The club never looked back. Almost a decade and more than 10,000 volunteer construction hours later, SATC opened The Askew Tennis Centre in late 2019. The state-of-the-art centre features three indoor courts, washrooms, changing facilities and a viewing gallery. 

Today, SATC enjoys a unique standing. Almost fifty years ago, the club was nothing more than a dream among a handful of players. Since then, and through almost exclusively volunteer efforts, SATC has evolved into an enviable year-round tennis facility and a thriving member of the Salmon Arm community.