I have been watching this tournament for years, including starting in the old site at the Indian Wells Hyatt Hotel before it moved to the beautiful Indian Wells Tennis Garden. You can view a map of the site but you won’t get the real view of how large the grounds are without visiting the location yourself. Not only are there two large stadiums besides the primary venue, there are over 20 courts for matches as well as for practice. I always find it interesting that sometimes the crowds to watch Agassi PRACTICE are larger than some matches of the tournament. There is plenty of lawn space for relaxing, a food court area (where a huge screen plays the feature matches), and of course the shopping tents. See for Map of the site .

Originally I had a season ticket for Prime loge seats, but when the tournament moved, I upgraded to the Stadium seats (just behind courtside). The tickets are a little expensive but absolutely GREAT seats. And many times, especially for night matches, we were able to move down so we were closer. We watched a few of the matches in the first row including the men’s doubles finals in 2001! A hint about the sun: if you want to be behind the players, the south side are the best seats since you get out of the sun the quickest (but you look into the sun at the beginning) and the North side, where we had seats, are great for sun tanning until about 3pm! Between West and East, if you get a chance for West seats, grab them! See for seating chart.

There are so many reasons why I love going to this tournament.
I am close to the action (why pay good money for seats that are so far away that the players look like ants!).
We have also seen great memorable matches such as the 2001 Agassi –Sampras final, though I felt the best men’s match that year was the quarters where Sampras defeated Rafter.
In 2000, there were so many great women doubles matches that sometimes there were more people packed into the secondary courts than the primary stadium. Not only did we see Davenport and Morariu defeat Kournikova and Zvereva, we managed to get seats when other great teams were playing including Hingis and Pierce, Capriati and Seles, and Raymond and Stubbs.
There are so many great qualifiers to watch.
We have also seen several people who were on their swan song (such as Rafter and Edberg).
We have seen many up and coming players such as Hantuchova, Smashnova, and Henin.

I just love watching great tennis at this tournament!