US Open Court Surface: Grass to Clay to Hard Courts
The US Open court surface is a cushioned acrylic hard court laid by Laykold, but the American major has also been played on grass and on green clay.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished US Open & American Tennis25 min read
- Grass years
- 1881-1974
- Clay years
- 1975-1977
- Hard courts since
- 1978
- Laykold since
- 2020
Jimmy Connors won the US Open in 1974 on grass, in 1976 on clay and in 1978 on a hard court, and nobody else has a record like it, because no other Grand Slam has changed its ground underfoot so often. Wimbledon has always been grass. Roland Garros has always been clay. Melbourne went from grass to hard courts once and has since changed hard-court products twice. New York tried all three in the space of five years.
Today the answer is simple. The US Open is played on an acrylic hard court, built since 2020 by Laykold on top of an asphalt base, painted blue inside the lines and green outside them. It replaced DecoTurf, which had been the tournament's surface since the move to Flushing Meadows in 1978. Before that the championships were played on Har-Tru green clay at Forest Hills for three years, and on grass for almost a century before that, starting at the Newport Casino in Rhode Island in 1881.
The US Open court surface today, and the only major staged on three surfaces
Every match at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, from the first qualifying round on an outside court to the night final in the stadium that now hosts the biggest matches, is played on the same specification. That uniformity matters. A player who practices on Court 17 in the morning plays the same product in the evening, with the same layering and the same paint, laid by the same contractor.
The surface is an acrylic hard court. That label covers a family of products rather than one material, and the differences between them are the reason a hard court in New York can play nothing like a hard court in the California desert. What they share is a rigid base, usually asphalt or concrete, under a coating system that a player actually touches. The coating decides almost everything a player notices: the grip, the bounce, the speed of the ball off the ground.
Laykold took over in 2020 under a multi-year agreement with the USTA, ending a run of 42 tournaments on DecoTurf. The color scheme the tournament adopted in 2005, a darker blue playing area inside a green surround, stayed with the change.
The three-surface record is the part of the history that surprises people. The other three majors have each kept one surface or moved once. The US Open moved twice in the space of four championships, from grass to clay in 1975 and from clay to hard courts in 1978, and the second move came with a change of address as well.
- 1881First championship on grass
- 1975First year on Har-Tru clay
- 1978First year on hard courts
- 2020First year on Laykold
Calendar years in which each surface was first used at the US national championships. The Open era began in 1968, on grass at Forest Hills.
Why a single surface across every court
At some tournaments the show courts and the outside courts are built differently, or resurfaced on different schedules, and players will tell anyone listening that they can feel it. The US Open's approach is to resurface its courts ahead of the event so the stadium courts and the practice courts behave as one surface. It is not a perfect guarantee. A stadium court with its roof closed, a shaded outside court and a sun-baked one at three in the afternoon still play differently, because temperature changes how the ball and the coating behave. The specification is the same everywhere; the conditions are not.
What a US Open hard court is made of: asphalt, cushion and sand-filled paint
A hard court looks like a slab of colored concrete. It is closer to a layered cake, and the order of the layers is what a contractor sells.
At the bottom is the base. Most American acrylic courts, including those in Flushing Meadows, sit on asphalt laid over a compacted stone sub-base, graded so that rain runs off rather than pooling. Concrete is the other common choice, harder and more expensive, and less prone to cracking in some climates. The base is not meant to be felt by a player. Its job is to be flat, stable and drained.
On top of that come the cushion coats. These are layers of acrylic binder mixed with rubber granules, applied wet and allowed to cure, and the number of layers sets how much give the court has under a landing foot. A court with no cushion is hard in the plain sense. A court with several coats feels softer to walk on, and players feel the difference in their knees after a long week more than they notice it in a single rally.
Then the color coats. These are acrylic paints, and they are not smooth. Silica sand is mixed into the paint, and the amount and grade of that sand is the main lever on the speed of the court.
The sand in the paint is the speed dial
When a tennis ball lands, it skids briefly before it grips and starts to rise. How much it skids depends on friction between the felt and the surface. More sand in the top coat means a rougher texture, more friction, a shorter skid and a ball that slows down more on the bounce and kicks up higher. Less sand means a smoother finish, a longer skid and a ball that stays faster and lower. The general account of engineered hard-court surfaces on this site works through the physics in more detail.
This is why "hard court" on its own tells a fan very little. Two courts built on identical asphalt can play at very different speeds because one was finished with a coarse sand mix and the other with a fine one. It is also why a tournament can change its pace without changing its supplier: specify a different top coat and the ball behaves differently.
The paint also wears. Sand is gradually polished away by footwork and ball strikes, so a court gets slicker and faster with use until it is resurfaced. That effect is small over a fortnight, but it is one reason players sometimes report a court feeling quicker in the second week than it did in qualifying.
- Sub-baseCompacted crushed stone, graded so water drains off the court.
- Asphalt baseA smooth, rigid layer laid flat to tight tolerances. Players never touch it.
- ResurfacerA filler coat that seals the asphalt and evens out small imperfections.
- Cushion coatsAcrylic binder with rubber granules, applied in several layers to add give underfoot.
- Color coatsAcrylic paint with silica sand mixed in. The sand texture sets grip and speed.
- Line paintWhite lines painted last, with a texture of their own so they are not slippery.
The general layer order of a cushioned acrylic tennis court. Exact layer counts and mixes are set by the contractor's specification and are not published as figures here.
How the US Open court surface plays: pace, bounce and who it rewards
The International Tennis Federation measures surfaces with a test it calls Court Pace Rating, firing balls from a cannon at a fixed speed and angle and measuring how much speed they lose and how high they bounce. The result sorts courts into five bands, from slow to fast. The ITF publishes the classified products in an annual list, and tournaments run their own checks on site.
New York sits toward the quicker end of the hard-court scale. The usual description among players and coaches is medium-fast: quicker than the gritty courts at Indian Wells, slower than the indoor courts used in the European autumn. The exact reading moves from year to year with the top coat, the weather and the ball, so any single number quoted for "the US Open's speed" should be read as a snapshot rather than a constant.
The bounce matters as much as the speed. An acrylic hard court gives a true bounce, meaning the ball comes off the surface where and how a player expects it to. There are no divots, no bad hops off a worn baseline, no clay lines to catch a ball and send it sideways. The height of the bounce is moderate to high. A heavy topspin forehand will kick up to shoulder height on a hard court in a way it never would on grass.
Who that suits
A true, moderately quick bounce rewards two things above all: a serve that wins free points, and the ability to hit through the court with flat, early strokes. Pete Sampras won five US Opens on that formula. Serena Williams won six. The surface does not punish a counterpuncher the way fast grass once did, because the bounce gives a defender time, but it pays a player who can take the ball early and redirect pace.
It is also the most neutral of the three surfaces, which is the case for it. Grass favors the server and the volleyer heavily; slow clay favors the patient baseliner. A medium-paced hard court lets most styles win, and the honor roll since 1978 shows exactly that, from Mats Wilander's baseline game in 1988 to Stefan Edberg's serve-and-volley in 1991 and 1992. For a sense of how the hard-court events that lead into New York compare, see the summer hard-court swing before the US Open, where the same players test the same shots on different products.
Heat changes all of it. A late-August afternoon in Queens can push court temperatures far above the air temperature, and a hot court and a hot ball both play faster and bounce higher. The same court under lights at 11 p.m. is a slower, heavier surface, which is part of why the US Open night session has a character of its own.
The grass years, 1881 to 1974: Newport and then Forest Hills
The United States National Championships began in August 1881 on the grass courts of the Newport Casino in Rhode Island. They were a men's event to start with; the women's championship was first played in 1887, at the Philadelphia Cricket Club, and the two were held at separate venues for decades. Grass was the default surface for lawn tennis everywhere in that era. Nobody chose it in the sense that later organizers chose surfaces. It was what the game was played on.
Men's singles stayed at Newport until 1914 and moved to the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, in 1915. It spent a short spell in the early 1920s at the Germantown Cricket Club in Philadelphia before returning to Forest Hills, where the club built its horseshoe-shaped concrete stadium in 1923. The women's singles came to Forest Hills in 1921. For most of the twentieth century, "Forest Hills" was what Americans called the championships, the way the British say "Wimbledon".
| Years | Venue | Surface | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1881-1914 | Newport Casino, Rhode Island | Grass | Men's singles founded |
| 1915-1977 | West Side Tennis Club, Forest Hills | Grass, then clay | Main home for 63 years, with a short break in the early 1920s |
| 1975-1977 | West Side Tennis Club, Forest Hills | Har-Tru green clay | Grass dropped after 1974 |
| 1978-2019 | National Tennis Center, Flushing Meadows | DecoTurf acrylic hard court | Move to a public park |
| 2020 onward | USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center | Laykold acrylic hard court | Surface supplier changed |
Why the turf came to be hated
Grass is a crop. It has to be grown, cut, rolled and rested, and it wears badly under heavy use. At Forest Hills the courts were played on by members through the year and then asked to hold up through a fortnight of championship tennis in late summer heat, at the end of a growing season rather than the start of one. By the second week the baselines were often bare earth. Balls skidded through on the patches where the grass held and stood up or shot sideways on the patches where it had gone.
Players complained, loudly and for years. The complaints grew sharper after the Open era began in 1968 and professionals with no attachment to amateur tradition started to play the event. Arthur Ashe won that first open championship on grass, and so did Rod Laver in 1969, completing his second calendar Grand Slam. By the early 1970s the condition of the courts had become a standing grievance.
There was a commercial argument too. Fewer American clubs were maintaining grass courts, and the players coming through the American system had grown up on hard courts and clay. A national championship played on a surface its own juniors rarely touched made less sense with every year.
Three years on clay, 1975 to 1977: green Har-Tru at Forest Hills
In 1975 the West Side Tennis Club dug up its championship grass and laid Har-Tru. It was a compromise. The club wanted to stay at Forest Hills, the players wanted an end to the bad bounces, and clay could be installed on the existing courts without rebuilding the stadium.
Har-Tru is a distinctly American surface. It is made from crushed stone, a gray-green metabasalt, rather than the crushed brick used on the red clay of Paris, Rome and Madrid. The difference is more than color. Green clay is harder, it drains faster, it plays quicker and it gives a lower bounce than European red clay. Ball marks still show, sliding still works, and long rallies still happen, but a big hitter is punished less than on the slow red courts. It remains the most common clay at American clubs, especially in the East and the South, and the WTA event in Charleston still uses it. The site's explainer on how clay courts are layered and maintained covers the red version in more depth.
Who did it favor? The results answer that plainly. In 1975 the men's title went to Manuel Orantes of Spain, a left-handed clay-court craftsman, who saved match points against Guillermo Vilas in the semifinals and then beat Connors in the final. In 1977 Vilas himself won it, during a season in which he was close to unbeatable on clay. Connors split the difference, winning in 1976 by beating Bjorn Borg in the final.
Chris Evert won all three women's titles on Har-Tru. She was in the middle of a clay-court winning streak that ran to well over a hundred matches, and Forest Hills gave her three more of them.
Why it lasted only three years
Clay solved the bounce problem and created others. Clay courts need daily maintenance, sweeping, watering and rolling, and a championship with dozens of courts in use meant a large ground crew. Clay also handed the American title to European and South American baseliners at precisely the moment the USTA wanted a championship that looked like American tennis. And the relationship between the USTA and the West Side Tennis Club, a private members' club with its own interests, was becoming difficult. When the USTA decided to build its own home, there was never much question of building it with clay.
| Year | Men's singles champion | Women's singles champion | Surface |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1974 | Jimmy Connors | Billie Jean King | Grass |
| 1975 | Manuel Orantes | Chris Evert | Har-Tru clay |
| 1976 | Jimmy Connors | Chris Evert | Har-Tru clay |
| 1977 | Guillermo Vilas | Chris Evert | Har-Tru clay |
| 1978 | Jimmy Connors | Chris Evert | DecoTurf hard court |
The 1978 move to Flushing Meadows and DecoTurf
The USTA built its new home in a hurry. Its president, W.E. "Slew" Hester, pushed the plan through in the space of about a year, using land in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, the site of the 1964 World's Fair. The old Singer Bowl, an outdoor arena from the fair, was converted into the main stadium and named for Louis Armstrong, who had lived nearby in Corona. The site was on city parkland and the USTA ran it under an arrangement with the City of New York. In other words, the national championship moved from a private club with a waiting list to a public park.
The surface followed the address. A public tennis center was supposed to be open to the public outside the tournament weeks, which meant courts that could take heavy daily use for most of the year with little maintenance. Grass could not do that. Clay could, with a crew. An acrylic hard court could do it with almost nothing beyond sweeping and an occasional resurface.
The USTA chose DecoTurf II, a cushioned acrylic system made by California Products Corporation of Massachusetts. It was a deliberate statement about what American tennis had become. By the late 1970s the sport's boom years had filled public parks, high school campuses and new private clubs across the country with hard courts, because they were cheap to build and nearly free to keep. The players coming through the American junior and college systems were hard-court players. Putting the national championship on the same surface aligned the event with the country that played it.
What the players found
The early reports were mixed. The new courts were faster than the Har-Tru they replaced, the site was noisy, with planes from LaGuardia Airport passing overhead, and the atmosphere was nothing like the ivy-covered calm of Forest Hills. Some European players made no secret of disliking the move. Connors, who loved a crowd and a quick court, won the first final on the new surface in straight sets over Borg. The surface outlasted the complaints. DecoTurf stayed for 42 years, through the opening of Arthur Ashe Stadium in 1997 and the roof added to it in 2016.
The move also did something to the meaning of "the US Open". Forest Hills had been a members' club that hosted a national championship. Flushing Meadows was a national tennis center that happened to host a Grand Slam. In 2006 it was renamed the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.
Jimmy Connors and the three-surface record, with Chris Evert alongside
The record belongs to Connors alone, and it is likely to stay that way unless the tournament ever changes surface again. He won the title five times, and the first three wins came on three different surfaces in five years.
1974 came on Forest Hills grass. Connors beat Ken Rosewall in a final in which Rosewall won only two games, in the year he also won Wimbledon and the Australian Open. 1976 came on Har-Tru clay, beating Borg over four sets. 1978 came on DecoTurf at the new site, beating Borg again. He then won on the same hard courts in 1982 and 1983, both times beating Ivan Lendl in the final.
The record says something about Connors and something about the period. Connors played flat and early, taking the ball on the rise and driving it through the court, a style built on American hard courts and public parks. That style was effective on grass because grass rewarded taking time away. It was effective on fast green clay because green clay was not slow enough to neutralize it. It was most effective on hard courts, which are what it had been learned on. No other champion of the era had a game that adapted to all three as well, and the window in which all three surfaces were in use lasted only those five years.
Chris Evert's US Open record is in some ways the more remarkable one. She won six titles, three on Har-Tru from 1975 to 1977 and three on hard courts in 1978, 1980 and 1982. She never won the championship on grass, reaching the semifinals at Forest Hills in her first appearance as a 16-year-old in 1971 and failing to get past that round in the grass years. Her six titles across two surfaces make her the most decorated US Open singles champion of that transitional decade. The full men's and women's honor roll is set out in our list of American Grand Slam champions.
The record nobody else can attempt
No active player can win the US Open on grass or clay, so the three-surface record is closed. The broader feat, winning majors on all three surfaces across the four Slams, is open and has been done by several players. Connors's version is narrower and odder: one tournament, one city, three grounds. Only those five years made it possible.
Blue inside green: why the US Open courts changed color in 2005
For most of the DecoTurf era, the US Open courts were green, close to the shade of the old grass. In 2005 the tournament changed the playing area inside the lines to a darker blue and kept a green surround outside them. The tournament gave the official names "US Open Blue" and "US Open Green" to the two shades, and they have stayed since.
The stated reason was visibility. A yellow-green tennis ball against a green court is a poor contrast, and on a television screen it is worse. Blue sits opposite yellow on the color wheel. Against a blue court the ball stands out sharply, which helps the viewer at home, the spectator high in Arthur Ashe Stadium and, the tournament argued, the players tracking a ball traveling at well over 100 miles per hour off a first serve.
There were other motives that nobody hid. The change came a year after the US Open Series was launched in 2004 as a branded summer circuit, and a distinctive court color became part of the event's identity on screen. The Australian Open had stayed green until it moved to blue courts in 2008. Within a few years blue had become the default color for elite hard-court tennis, and green courts began to look old-fashioned.
Does color change how the court plays
No. The color is the pigment in the top coat, and the speed of a court is set by the texture of the sand in that coat and by the cushion beneath it. A blue court and a green court built to the same specification play the same. What color changes is perception. Some players have said a darker court makes the ball look as if it is moving faster, which is a statement about their eyes rather than the surface.
The switch from DecoTurf to Laykold in 2020
When the USTA announced that Laykold would replace DecoTurf from 2020, it ended a supplier relationship that had lasted since the move to Flushing Meadows. Laykold is a product line of Advanced Polymer Technology, a Pennsylvania company that also makes sports surfaces for other uses, and its systems were already in use elsewhere on the American hard-court calendar.
The first Laykold US Open was the 2020 tournament, which was played without spectators during the pandemic. That timing makes comparisons harder than they ought to be. A first year on a new surface would have been noticed anyway; a first year with empty stadiums, no qualifying draw, no mixed doubles and smaller doubles draws was strange enough that players' impressions of the court were mixed in with everything else.
What the USTA said it wanted was consistency and cushioning. Laykold's systems use a cushion layer designed to give more uniform shock absorption across a court, and the company's selling point was a surface that plays the same at the baseline and in the middle of the court, from one court to the next and from the start of the tournament to the end. Uniformity sounds dull as a selling point. For a player who has spent a week practicing on one court and is then sent to play on another, it is the point.
Is Laykold faster or slower than DecoTurf
The honest answer is that players disagree, and the question is harder to answer than it looks. The speed of a hard court is set by the top coat specification, which the tournament can and does adjust, not by the brand name. Since 2020 there have been years when players said the courts felt slow and heavy and years when they said the ball flew. Some of that is the surface. Some of it is the ball, the heat and the closing of the roofs. Some of it is the familiar habit of attributing a bad week to the ground.
The difference players report most consistently is underfoot rather than in ball speed: a cushioned surface that feels more forgiving to move on. Whether that holds up across a whole career on Laykold courts will take longer to know than the handful of tournaments played on it since 2020.
| Feature | DecoTurf era | Laykold era |
|---|---|---|
| Years in use at the US Open | 1978-2019 | 2020 onward |
| Base | Asphalt | Asphalt |
| Construction | Cushioned acrylic system | Cushioned acrylic system |
| Playing area color | Green, then blue from 2005 | Blue |
| Surround color | Green | Green |
The ball as half the surface: Wilson, felt and one ball for everyone
Ask a player how a court plays and the answer usually comes back about the ball. Pace and bounce are a product of both, and a change in one can undo a change in the other. Wilson has supplied the official US Open ball since the late 1970s, so the ball has been more stable than the court itself.
The ITF's rules recognize different ball types for different surfaces. A regular-duty ball has felt woven tightly, suited to clay and indoor courts. An extra-duty ball has a thicker, fluffier felt built to last longer on an abrasive hard court. The extra felt also makes the ball heavier in the air as it fluffs up during play, which slows it down over a set. The ITF's ball categories are set out in a separate explainer.
For decades the US Open used extra-duty balls for men and regular-duty balls for women. The reasoning offered was that women's matches were shorter and the regular-duty ball suited the women's game, but many players thought the regular-duty ball fluffed up quickly on hard courts, flew unpredictably and was harder on the arm. The complaints grew louder in the 2020s, and the tournament responded in the middle of the decade by putting the women on the same extra-duty ball as the men. The full effect of that change on the women's game in New York will need several tournaments to judge.
Why the ball changes the court
An acrylic court with a lot of sand in the top coat is abrasive. It tears at the felt, and the felt fluffs up as it wears. A fluffy ball has more drag, slows down faster in flight and grips the court more on landing. That means the same court plays faster early in a set with new balls and slower as the balls age before the change after the first seven games and then every nine. The ball change in a US Open match is part of how the court plays.
What hard courts do to bodies and to American tennis
A hard court does not give. Grass and clay both absorb some of the energy of a landing foot or a sudden stop, and clay lets a player slide into a shot. On an acrylic court the energy goes back up through the ankle, the knee, the hip and the lower back. Cushion layers soften the hit, but they do not remove it, and the stop-start nature of the modern baseline game multiplies it across hundreds of changes of direction per match.
Players who have spent their careers on hard courts often talk about the joint load in the same breath as their results. The pattern is visible in the way the tour schedule is argued about: the stretch of hard-court events in North America in the summer, followed by the US Open, is one of the toughest runs on the body in the season. Some players now slide on hard courts as they would on clay, a technique that once looked reckless and is now a mark of the best movers, but it takes extraordinary balance and is not for everyone.
The points are shorter as well. Data from professional tennis consistently show most points on hard courts end within the first few shots, and the average rally is shorter than on clay. That suits a big serve and an aggressive return, and it makes a hard-court major a different test of fitness from Roland Garros: fewer marathon rallies, more explosive short ones.
A generation raised on concrete
Most American players learn the game on public hard courts and play their junior and college tennis on them. From Connors and McEnroe through Agassi, Sampras and Courier, then Serena and Venus Williams, Andy Roddick and the current generation, the American style has been a hard-court style: a big serve, an early ball, aggression from the baseline. The US Open's choice of surface in 1978 both reflected that and reinforced it, because the national championship became the event every young American player was building a game to win.
The flip side is obvious from the results. American men's success on clay has been scarce for decades, and American players have long been seen as uncomfortable on slow red clay. The US Open rewards precisely the game the country produces. Roland Garros asks for a different one.
The US Open against the Australian Open: two hard courts that do not play the same
The two hard-court majors share a category and very little else. Melbourne switched from grass to Rebound Ace in 1988, then to Plexicushion in 2008, and has used GreenSet since 2020, the same year New York moved to Laykold. Both are cushioned acrylic systems over a rigid base, and both are blue. They are still different products with different top coats, set by different tournaments to different targets.
The conditions differ even more. The Australian Open is played in January, in the southern summer, with extreme heat on some days and cool evenings on others, under a heat policy that can close roofs and suspend play on outside courts. The US Open is played in late August and early September in New York, hot and humid, with the heat building in the afternoon and night sessions running late. Humidity makes a ball feel heavier; dry heat makes it fly.
| Feature | US Open | Australian Open |
|---|---|---|
| Current surface | Laykold acrylic hard court | GreenSet acrylic hard court |
| Surface since | 2020 | 2020 |
| Previous hard-court surface | DecoTurf, 1978-2019 | Plexicushion, 2008-2019 |
| First hard-court year | 1978 | 1988 |
| Grass until | 1974 | 1987 |
| Month played | Late August into September | January |
The balls differ too. Wilson supplies New York; Melbourne moved to Dunlop balls in 2019. A player who wins in Melbourne in January has no guarantee of winning in New York in September, and the results tell that story year after year.
Which plays faster
There is no fixed answer, because both tournaments have adjusted their top coats over the years and both surfaces have been described as fast and slow in different seasons. New York has more often been described as the quicker of the two, but that is a tendency, not a rule. What can be said with confidence is that the two events are built to different specifications, in different climates, with different balls, and that a "hard-court major" is two separate tests that happen to share a name. Readers who want the wider picture of American and world tennis can start from the site's tennis section.