Grass to GreenSet: The Australian Open Surface History
Every Australian Open surface explained — 83 years of grass, then Rebound Ace, Plexicushion and GreenSet, how each one played and why each was replaced.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished The Australian Open19 min read
- Years on grass
- 1905 to 1987, the large majority of the tournament's life
- First hard court year
- 1988, at the new Melbourne Park precinct
- Rebound Ace
- 1988 to 2007, laid green
- Plexicushion
- 2008 to 2019, the first blue courts
- GreenSet
- 2020 onwards, supplied from Spain
- Colour change
- Green to blue in 2008, a television decision
- Surface family
- Cushioned acrylic over asphalt or concrete, in all three hard court eras
- ITF classification
- Medium to medium-fast across the hard court period
The australian open surface question is asked as though it has one answer, and it has four. The tournament has been played on grass, on Rebound Ace, on Plexicushion and on GreenSet, and those four surfaces span a change so large — turf to acrylic — and three changes so small that most spectators never noticed two of them.
The proportions are the surprise. Grass was the Australian Open surface from 1905 to 1987, eighty-three years, which is longer than everything that followed put together and will remain so until well into the 2070s. Hard courts, which is what everybody now associates with the tournament, arrived only in 1988, as part of the move from Kooyong to Melbourne Park.
This page covers what each surface was, physically, how each one played, why each was replaced, and what a hard court actually does to a tennis match under a Melbourne sun. The venue story is on Kooyong to Melbourne Park, the tournament's wider arc is in the complete history, and the arena itself is covered on the Rod Laver Arena page.
Grass, 1905 to 1987
For most of its life the Australian championship was a grass-court tournament, and Australian grass was a specific thing rather than a generic one.
It was fast and low. Australian courts were typically harder underneath than Wimbledon's, with a shorter cut and a drier profile by January, and the bounce skidded rather than sat up. That is the surface on which the Australian tennis tradition was built, and it explains the shape of the country's great players: Frank Sedgman, Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall, Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, John Newcombe and Margaret Court all learned to play on a surface that rewarded getting to the net early and punished anyone who wanted to construct a long rally from the baseline.
The problems with it were real, though, and they got worse as the tournament got bigger. Grass wears. By the second week of a fortnight the baselines at a Grand Slam venue are bare earth, and the bounce becomes unpredictable in exactly the region of the court where matches are decided. Rain leaves it slick and forces suspensions that a fixed television schedule cannot absorb. And the maintenance burden is enormous: a grass court cannot be played on all day for fourteen consecutive days without being destroyed, which limits how many matches a venue can schedule per court per day.
There was also a competitive problem that grew through the 1970s and 1980s. The professional season was moving decisively onto hard courts. A grass major in January, six months away from Wimbledon and on the opposite side of the calendar from any other grass event, was an outlier that players had to prepare for separately. That is a friction cost, and it was one more reason not to enter.
The last Australian Open on grass was played at Kooyong from 12 to 25 January 1987, and won by Stefan Edberg and Hana Mandlikova.
- Years on grass83
- Years on hard court39
Years of use, comparing the single grass era with the combined hard court era to the 2026 tournament. The hard court figure covers all three cushioned acrylic products together, since they belong to the same surface family.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Years on grass | 83 |
| Years on hard court | 39 |
What a cushioned acrylic hard court actually is
Before the individual products, the shared anatomy, because all three of the tournament's hard courts are built the same way and differ only in the proportions and the materials of the middle layers.
- BaseA slab of asphalt or reinforced concrete, laid flat to a tight tolerance and left to cure. This is the structural layer and it determines whether the court is level enough for a true bounce.
- CushionRubberised layers, typically rubber granules bound in a polymer, applied over the base. This is the layer that makes the court forgiving underfoot and gives cushioned acrylic its name. Its thickness and composition are the biggest single influence on how the court feels.
- Acrylic coatsSeveral coats of acrylic paint loaded with fine silica sand. The sand is the friction control: more sand grips the ball for longer on impact and slows the court, less sand lets it skid on. This layer sets the pace of the surface.
- Colour and linesThe finish coat carries the colour, blue at the Australian Open since 2008, and the white line paint is applied last. Line paint is very slightly slicker than the court around it, which is why balls occasionally skid off a line unpredictably.
A construction sequence rather than a measurement. The specific materials and the number of coats vary by product and by installation, but every cushioned acrylic court at the tournament has been built on this pattern. Thicknesses are not shown because they differ between products and are not consistently published.
Two consequences follow from that stack, and they explain most of the arguments about tennis surfaces.
The first is that court speed is a manufacturing decision, not a property of the material. The same product laid with more sand in the top coat plays slower. A tournament that wants a faster or slower court can order one, within limits, without changing supplier — which is why claims that a particular brand is inherently fast or slow should be treated carefully.
The second is that the cushion layer and the surface layer do different jobs. Cushioning affects the player's joints and the sound of the court; it has relatively little effect on ball speed. Sand loading affects ball speed; it has relatively little effect on the joints. Products get compared as if these were one dial, and they are two.
Rebound Ace, 1988 to 2007
The first hard court at Melbourne Park was Rebound Ace, laid green, made by California Products Corporation of Andover, Massachusetts. It was the Australian Open surface for twenty years and it also hosted the tennis at the Sydney 2000 Olympics at Sydney Olympic Park.
Physically it was a cushioned system built from polyurethane rubber and fibreglass layers over an asphalt or reinforced concrete base, with more cushion than the DecoTurf used at the US Open in the same period. In the hand and underfoot it was soft. Players described it as tacky rather than slick.
In playing terms that produced a distinctive court. The ball gripped on impact and came up high, which suited players who could handle a ball above shoulder height and hurt players who liked it low. Rallies were longer than the era's other hard courts produced. The high bounce also rewarded heavy topspin at a time when topspin was becoming the dominant shot shape in the men's game.
For a decade it worked well and nobody complained much. Then the argument about heat started.
The Rebound Ace heat problem
Melbourne in January regularly delivers days above 35 degrees, and the surface temperature of a dark court in direct sun runs well above the air temperature.
Rebound Ace, being a rubber-based system, softened as it heated. The tackiness that made it grippy at 22 degrees became something else at 40: players reported that shoes stuck during a change of direction, that the foot did not release cleanly, and that the court felt like it was grabbing at them. Anyone who has played on a hot rubberised surface will recognise the description.
Whether that actually caused injuries is the part of the story that is usually told badly. Concerns were raised formally in 2002 and were investigated. The investigations did not find evidence that Rebound Ace was responsible for the injuries attributed to it, and the tournament's then chief executive Paul McNamee said as much publicly.
But a tournament does not get to win that argument. Once a surface has a reputation for hurting people, every retirement and every ankle on the tournament becomes a data point in the public mind, whatever the testing says. The surface had also acquired a second reputation, harder to dismiss: that it changed character with the weather, so a player drawn into a 39-degree afternoon was playing a different court from a player drawn into a cool morning. That is a fairness problem rather than a safety one, and it is not answerable with testing.
Rebound Ace ceased to be the official surface in 2007. The replacement was announced and installed for the 2008 tournament.
Plexicushion, 2008 to 2019, and the blue
Plexicushion came from the same manufacturer as Rebound Ace — California Products Corporation's sports division — which tells you the change was about product specification rather than about abandoning a supplier relationship.
It was thinner and harder than what it replaced, with less cushion and a firmer response. It played a shade lower and a shade quicker off the bounce, and, critically, its behaviour changed less across the temperature range. That consistency was the point of the exercise. The tournament wanted a court that played the same at eleven in the morning and four in the afternoon.
Players noticed immediately, and the reaction split roughly along the lines you would predict. Those whose games depended on the old high, sitting bounce found the ball coming through lower and having to be taken earlier. Those who preferred a flatter, quicker court were pleased. The general view, once a couple of years had passed, was that the change was modest in absolute terms and large relative to what players are used to feeling.
The other change was the colour, and it had nothing to do with playing character. The court went from green to blue for 2008. The reasoning was television: a yellow ball against blue gives better contrast for a broadcast audience than a yellow ball against green, and better contrast also helps automated line-calling and ball-tracking systems. The US Open had made a comparable move. Blue has stayed ever since, and it is now the single most recognisable visual fact about the Australian Open.
GreenSet, from 2020
The third hard court change was the least noticed of the three, because it was designed to be.
GreenSet Worldwide, a Spanish-based manufacturer, became the tournament's official court surface supplier for the 2020 event, replacing Plexicushion after twelve years. Tennis Australia's chief executive Craig Tiley announced the change in terms of welcoming a new supplier rather than fixing a problem, which is a reasonable summary of what it was.
The surface family did not change. GreenSet at Melbourne Park is a cushioned acrylic system with the same layer anatomy as its predecessors, and the deliberate intention was to keep the playing character close to what players had spent a decade adapting to. Nobody wanted a repeat of the 2008 conversation.
The stated advantages were around installation quality and consistency across the whole precinct, and around environmental performance, including the use of recycled material. The manufacturer also makes claims about thermal reflectivity reducing court surface temperature in direct sun compared with older systems, which if accurate matters a good deal at a tournament that has spent thirty years arguing about heat. Those are the manufacturer's claims rather than independently published test results, and they should be read as such.
The four eras, side by side
| Surface | Years | Type | Bounce | Behaviour in heat | Colour |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grass | 1905-1987 | Natural turf over soil | Low and skidding, degrading through the fortnight | Faster and harder when baked, slick when wet | Green |
| Rebound Ace | 1988-2007 | Polyurethane rubber and fibreglass, heavily cushioned | High and grippy | Softened and became tacky; the central complaint | Green |
| Plexicushion | 2008-2019 | Acrylic over a thinner cushion | Slightly lower, slightly quicker | Markedly more consistent than Rebound Ace | Blue |
| GreenSet | 2020- | Cushioned acrylic | Deliberately close to Plexicushion | Manufacturer claims improved thermal reflectivity | Blue |
How the courts get laid, and why consistency across a precinct is hard
A Grand Slam does not lay one court. Melbourne Park runs match courts and practice courts across the whole precinct, and every one of them is expected to play the same as every other, because a player who practises on one surface and competes on another is being asked to recalibrate mid-tournament.
That is harder than it sounds. Acrylic coats are applied by hand with squeegees, in multiple passes, and the amount of material laid down varies slightly with the operator, the temperature, the humidity and the day. Sand loading in the mix is measured, but a court is a large area and the tolerance across it is not zero. Getting several dozen courts to behave identically is a manufacturing consistency problem more than a design one, which is a substantial part of why a tournament changes supplier at all — the installation service matters as much as the chemistry.
The work happens in the months before January, not in the fortnight itself. The base slabs are permanent, so the annual work is a repaint: cleaning, patching, and fresh acrylic and line paint, timed so that the coats have fully cured before anyone hits on them. A newly laid court plays slightly differently from a court a few weeks old, which is one reason the resurfacing calendar is planned backwards from the first ball of qualifying rather than from the first ball of the main draw.
Then there is the arena court, which is not a permanent part of the building at all. The court inside the main show court is built up over the arena floor for the tournament and removed afterwards, so that the room can host concerts and basketball for the rest of the year. It has to reproduce, on a temporary build, the exact bounce characteristics of a court laid on a permanent slab outside. That the two are indistinguishable to a professional is the least appreciated piece of engineering at the tournament.
What the surface change did to Australian tennis itself
The 1988 decision was made about a tournament, but its largest long-term effect was on the country's players, and it took a generation to show up.
Australian tennis had produced grass-court players because Australian children played on grass. Club courts, school courts and the public courts in country towns were turf or something close to it, and the game that surface teaches is a forward-moving one: get in behind a serve, take the volley, finish the point before the bounce betrays you. That is the game Sedgman, Hoad, Rosewall, Laver, Emerson and Newcombe played, and it won an extraordinary number of majors.
When the national championship went to hard court, the pathway followed. Grass is expensive to maintain and cannot be played on year-round, and the economics of a suburban club in the 1990s did not favour it. Australian juniors moved onto hard courts and synthetic grass — a carpet-and-sand surface that looks like turf and plays nothing like it — and onto the cushioned acrylic the national body was now installing at its own facilities.
The result is that Australia stopped producing serve-volleyers and started producing baseliners, on roughly the same timetable as the rest of the world. Whether that was a loss is arguable; the professional game moved that way regardless of what surface anybody grew up on, and a country that kept training grass-court specialists into the 2000s would have been training them for one fortnight a year. But it is a real consequence of a venue decision, and it is the kind of second-order effect that never appears in the case put to a government.
- 4Distinct surfaces used since 1905
- 4Functional layers in a cushioned acrylic court
- 2Court colours used across the tournament's history
- 19Consecutive years on blue to 2026
Structural facts about the tournament surface as currently laid. The layer count refers to the functional layers of a cushioned acrylic court rather than to the number of individual coats applied, which varies by installation. The colour figure counts distinct court colours used across the tournament's history.
The other surfaces of the Australian summer
The Australian Open does not stand alone in January, and the surfaces around it are part of the same decision.
Every significant lead-in event on the Australian summer circuit is played on hard court, and deliberately so: the whole point of a lead-in tournament is to give players competitive matches in conditions that resemble the major they are preparing for. Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney, Perth and Hobart all run acrylic hard courts. The mixed-teams event that now opens the season does the same.
The one apparent exception proves the point. The Kooyong Classic, the invitational exhibition staged at the old venue in the week before the Australian Open, is played on a cushioned hard court, not on grass, even though Kooyong remains substantially a grass-court club with a large number of turf courts in use. The stadium centre court was converted after the Open left, precisely so that the exhibition would be useful preparation rather than a picturesque irrelevance.
Grass survives in Australian tennis, but as a club and heritage surface rather than a competitive one. Kooyong still has it. Davis Cup has returned there on a temporary grass court. But no professional tournament of consequence in the Australian summer is played on turf, and there is no realistic path back, because the calendar has no room for a grass swing in January and no player would want one immediately before a hard-court major.
Court pace, and what the numbers do and do not tell you
The ITF measures surfaces with a Court Pace Rating, which captures how much a surface slows the ball horizontally on impact and how the bounce angle changes. Ratings are grouped into five categories, from slow at one end to fast at the other, with medium and medium-fast in the middle.
Australian Open hard courts have sat in the medium to medium-fast band across the whole modern era. That is the honest, defensible statement. What circulates online is a great deal more precise than that — specific index numbers attributed to specific years, and confident rankings of the four majors by speed — and most of it is estimated rather than measured. Tennis Australia does not publish a court pace figure for each tournament, and independent testing of a particular court in a particular January is rarely made public.
There is a further complication that the numbers cannot capture. A rating is measured on a surface under controlled conditions. A tennis match is played in whatever conditions Melbourne provides. Hot, dry air is less dense, so the ball flies faster through it and comes off the court higher. Cool evening air with the roof shut is denser and stiller, so the ball is slower and heavier and the rallies lengthen. The same court, on the same day, can play two noticeably different ways between the afternoon and the night session.
That is why the persistent player observation that "the court is slower this year" is often true and often not about the court at all.
Did the surfaces change who wins?
This is the question people actually want answered, and it deserves an honest treatment rather than a confident one.
The grass era's champions were, overwhelmingly, players built for grass: serve-volleyers and shot-makers who took the ball early. That is not a subtle effect. The surface selected for a style, and Australia produced players in that style for four decades because Australian juniors grew up on it.
The Rebound Ace years produced a wide spread of winners and no single dominant figure across the twenty tournaments. The high bounce and the heavy grip suited players who could hit through a ball above the shoulder. Andre Agassi won four Australian Opens, all of them on Rebound Ace, on a surface whose bounce suited a player who stood on the baseline and took the ball on the rise better than almost anyone.
The Plexicushion years overlap almost exactly with Novak Djokovic's Melbourne record, and he won the majority of the tournaments played on it. Whether the surface caused that is genuinely unclear. A flatter, more consistent, medium-fast court that rewards depth, movement and returning is a plausible description of the ideal Djokovic court. It is also true that Djokovic won on GreenSet immediately afterwards, and won on other surfaces at the same time, so the surface explanation is at best partial.
The safest conclusion is the modest one. The 1988 change from grass to hard court altered the kind of player who wins the Australian Open profoundly. The three changes since have altered it at the margins, and the margins in professional tennis are where matches are decided, which is why players care about a difference spectators cannot see.
What the surface means for a spectator
Three practical things follow from all of this if you are watching, either at Melbourne Park or on television.
- Afternoon and night are different sports. Heat makes the ball fast and the bounce high. A cool evening under a closed roof makes it slower and heavier. Judge a player's form against the conditions they had, not against the conditions in the previous match.
- The second week is not the second week it used to be. On grass, a Grand Slam changed character as the courts wore. On acrylic it does not. A semi-final plays on the same surface as a first-round match, which removes a variable that used to shape every major.
- The colour is not neutral. Blue paint absorbs heat differently from green, and dark surfaces in direct Melbourne sun run substantially hotter than the air. It is part of why the tournament's heat protocol measures radiant heat rather than air temperature alone, and it sits alongside the same problem that Australian cricket has had to formalise.
A chronology
- 1905 to 1987 — Grass, across seven cities and ten venues.
- January 1987 — The last Australian Open on grass, at Kooyong.
- January 1988 — The tournament opens at Flinders Park on Rebound Ace, laid green.
- 2000 — Rebound Ace is used for the Olympic tennis in Sydney.
- 2002 — Player concerns about Rebound Ace softening in heat are raised formally and investigated.
- 2007 — Rebound Ace ceases to be the official Australian Open surface.
- 2008 — Plexicushion is installed and the courts turn blue.
- 2019 — The last Australian Open on Plexicushion.
- 2020 — GreenSet becomes the tournament surface, with the colour and playing character deliberately preserved.
Numbers worth carrying
- Surfaces used: four, in two families.
- Years on grass: 83, from 1905 to 1987.
- Years on hard court to date: 39, from 1988.
- Rebound Ace: 1988 to 2007, twenty years, green.
- Plexicushion: 2008 to 2019, twelve years, the first blue courts.
- GreenSet: from 2020, supplied from Spain.
- ITF band: medium to medium-fast throughout the hard court era.
- Layer count in a cushioned acrylic court: base, cushion, acrylic coats, colour and line paint.
For the venue decision that forced the change from grass in the first place, see Kooyong to Melbourne Park. For the tournament's full story from 1905, see the Australian Open's complete history, and for the arena the surface is laid in each January, see Rod Laver Arena. The rest of the sport is indexed under tennis, and other Australian venues and events are on the Australia hub and the sports index.