Serving Up Opportunity
Unbeatable on the courts, Jodie Adams now works to build them
In her hometown of Springfield, Missouri, Jodie Adams was a tennis prodigy. She was the first undefeated female tennis player ever at her high school, and when she went on to play at Missouri State University, she won almost 400 titles. She was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2004, and in 2017 she won that organization’s President’s Award.
Her larger contribution to the sport of tennis, however, came after all those achievements, during a career as a parks and recreation director in Springfield and as a consultant on and promoter of racquet sports and facilities all over the country.
And now she lives in Billings, where she is putting her skills and experience to use by supporting efforts to build an indoor tennis and pickleball center that she says would make it possible for Billings to bid on sectional, regional and even tournaments.
Cyndy Densin, president of the Billings Tennis Association board, says Jodie’s “enthusiasm is incredible and contagious. Jodie has endless energy, and her organization skills and her knowledge to pursue and develop a project are amazing.”
Jodie, for her part, says that while the economic impacts of a tennis center could be big, it’s important to do in Billings what she did in Springfield — to promote sports for the sake of sports, and to give everybody in the community an opportunity to participate.
That fundamental outlook was something she and her two older brothers learned from her parents. Her mother and father were athletes, Jodie says, but their primary focus was on providing their children with the chance to take part in whatever sports caught their interest.
“They never held us back, but they never pushed us,” Jodie says. “You truly knew that all three of us played for the love of the sport. That’s all it was.”
Love can be a strong motivator. Her brother Jim was a professional polo player, and brother Tom, the oldest of the siblings, was a professional tennis player. With Tom as her partner, Jodie started playing in adult tournaments when she was 13, and she played women’s doubles with a lifelong friend 16 years her senior.
After high school, Jodie became one of the first athletes at Missouri State offered a full-ride athletic scholarship after the passage of Title IX, the federal law that prohibited discrimination based on sex in educational programs and activities. Brother Tom was the men’s tennis coach at the university at the time, and she practiced with him and his players, which gave a big boost to her skills.
Then, in 1979, just before she was to graduate from college with a degree in recreation administration, she was offered a job as an entry-level manager for Springfield’s park department, where she would run the city’s brand-new indoor tennis center, as well as the women’s sports programs.
About the same time, she was asked by a tennis player from Texas, who had seen Jodie play at a national collegiate tourney, to be her partner in a doubles wild card entry at Wimbledon, the most prestigious tennis tournament in the world. Jodie declined the invitation, and she says without hesitation that she has no regrets. The job offer meant more to her than another opportunity to play tennis.
“I either had to take the job or it was going to pass me by,” she says. “It was a dream job for me to get at 21 years old, in my hometown.”
“Really,” she continues, “what I did was, I regenerated my focus, putting it into administration, and I really took my enthusiasm for sports in general into my job. My total focus since I’ve been in parks and recreation administration has been to create opportunities for everyone. That has driven me all these decades, and it still does today.”
She would go on to put in 37 years of service with what is now the Springfield-Greene County Park Board, working her way up through the organization and retiring as director. That in itself would have been a big accomplishment, but while working for the people of Springfield, she continuously expanded her involvement in statewide, regional and eventually national associations and boards.
She credits the man who hired her, Dan Kinney, whom she succeeded as parks director, with making sure she had opportunities to broaden her skills and her outlook.
“The key was, he enabled me to grow, he enabled me to travel,” Jodie says. “He made sure that when there were training opportunities, I could go to national schools and learn.”
Thanks to those opportunities, she would serve on the National Recreation and Park Association board of directors, and was its president in 2009-10. She was also on the boards of the U.S. Tennis Association and the U.S. Olympic Committee. She co-authored three books about parks and rec administration and taught at Missouri State from 2012 to 2021. She and a partner, Peggy Riggs, started a consulting firm, Brio 2, whose focus now is working with the U.S. Tennis Association on the development of racquet-sport facilities around the country.
That’s not all . Jodie met women’s tennis trailblazer Billie Jean King during her years on the tennis tour, then served with her on the U.S. Tennis Association board. During Jodie’s tenure at the park department in Springfield, the city became the first municipal owner of a World Team Tennis franchise, the Springfield Lazers. King was involved in the origins of the WTT, a mixed-gender professional tennis league, and Jodie was the general manager of the Lazers.
Jodie first spent time in this area of the country more than 25 years ago, when she went to Yellowstone National Park, under the auspices of Yellowstone Forever, to learn about the reintroduction of wolves into the park. She went back to Yellowstone many times over the years, and then, at the urging of two university colleagues, started a “study-away program” for students and teachers at Missouri State to have the same experience.
She would often visit Billings on those trips, making many friends in the area. Another connection was through her brother and sister-in-law, who at one time planned to open a honey-baked ham store in Billings. They purchased land for the project but decided on another location before opening the store.
Then, about 15 years ago, the U.S. Tennis Association invited Jodie to Billings to lend her expertise to efforts to build an indoor tennis center here. Those plans eventually resulted in the Elks Tennis Center on Lewis Avenue. The Elks property was later purchased by a developer hoping to build a high-end housing complex on the site. Those plans are now in limbo, and the fate of the tennis center is uncertain, at best.
When Jodie retired from her administrative and teaching jobs in Springfield, she knew she wanted to live somewhere near the mountains, zeroing in on either Colorado or Montana. In the end she chose Billings, partly because of the friends she made here and partly because the city’s potential reminded her of Springfield as it was years ago.
“One thing that I just really felt was that, you’re known for the outdoors here, and now is the time for the indoors to be taken care of,” she says. “That’s why I’m involved now. I’m ready to see it happen here.”
Jodie quickly became a member of the Billings Tennis Association board, and a member of the Billings Pickleball Association. She was part of the planning process that resulted in a full-blown feasibility study for an indoor tennis and pickleball center in Billings, conducted by Sports Facilities Company LLC, headquartered in Florida. The study was completed in March 2024.
The study, which included a five-year financial forecast and an economic impact analysis, calls for an indoor center with six tennis courts, eight pickleball courts, a sports performance training area, 5,000 square feet that would be leased for sports medicine activities, a racquet sport pro shop and support offices.
The price tag is estimated at $29 million to $35 million, not including the costs of the needed land, about 6.6 acres. That’s an ambitious plan, to say the least, but Jodie believes it’s doable, and that the time is ripe.
“We’re experiencing such a resurgence of tennis right now, and then obviously with the development of pickleball, it’s phenomenal what’s happening,” she says. She is fond of statistics like these: there are 25.7 million tennis players nationwide, a number that grew by 5.9 million in just the past three years. Pickleball has 19 million players, up 5 million in just three years.
Other communities in Montana, including Hardin, Missoula, Great Falls and Bozeman, are looking at building new courts, indoors and out, or doing major upgrades at existing courts.
The feasibility study projects that an indoor center in Billings would begin to show positive revenue generation in the fourth year of operation, and that local economic impacts would total $1.2 million a year in the fifth year. No site has been chosen yet, but Jodie says Amend Park, where there is already a big soccer complex and where an ice arena is under construction, would be logical fit.
Kevin Schuh, with Sports Facilities Company, led the predevelopment study for the local tennis association. Though this was the first time he worked directly with Jodie, he says, he used to work in parks and rec in St. Louis, Missouri, and was familiar with her work in Springfield.
Kevin describes Jodie as “a leader in every sense of the word.” He continues, “Her background in tennis is clear and very impressive, but her passion and knowledge in parks and recreation is unmatched. She has built a career in impacting communities through public recreation.”
Jodie says the plan for an indoor tennis center make look grandiose, but her experience, including attending revenue-management schools, showed her that there are multiple avenues of funding, including grants, bonding and fundraising. The BTA has already acquired the services of the Bannack Firm out of Bozeman, one of the top fundraising companies in the state.
“I’m really optimistic because of our studies, because we know the players are there,” she says. “We know it’s going to be a heavy lift, but it’s the right lift. We’ve been working around the clock for 24 months, and we have a plan and we’re ready to go.”
