ABOUT
The Cincinnati Open is one of the oldest and most prestigious tennis tournaments in the U.S., consistently attracting the world’s top players to southern Ohio every August.
Since Beemok Capital acquired the event in 2022, the tournament has been on a bold path of growth and transformation. The tournament’s long-time home, the Lindner Family Tennis Center, underwent a massive $260 million renovation in 2025 that doubled the venue's size to 40 acres, adding state-of-the-art facilities to elevate the experience for players, fans, and the local community.
The reimagined campus provides a world-class environment for one of the tour’s premier tennis events, while expanding the event’s size and duration. The investment, done in partnership with the City of Mason, Warren County, and the State of Ohio, also turned the Lindner Family Tennis Center into a year-round community asset with racquet sports, dining, and event spaces.
With thousands of spectators, athletes, and staff members coming to the Lindner Family Tennis Center every August, ensuring the safety and security of everyone involved has always been a top priority. However, the massive renovation demanded a new approach to access control that provided secure entry points for new player facilities and maintained the tournament’s welcoming environment.
Robert Nichols, Principal Technical Architect for Beemok Capital, wanted security to match the new venue. His requirements included a sophisticated, cloud-based access control platform, reader technology capable of handling complex credentialing needs, and the ability for employees to use their mobile wallets to access buildings.
"The venue's transformation has set a new standard in the tennis world. What makes the Cincinnati Open unique is the close interaction between the players and the fans. With the expansion, our responsibility for security grew — but we still wanted to maintain that intimacy."
Robert Nichols | Principal Technical Architect, Beemok Capital
THE CHALLENGE
Scaling Security for Complex, High-Volume Credentialing
The renovation brought to life Beemok’s vision for a modern venue with upgraded player amenities and fan experiences. The expansion allowed the tournament’s singles draw to increase from 56 to 96 players, extending play from nine to 14 days.
The project’s scale, however, introduced new security challenges.
A Massive Expansion
The facility now features 31 outdoor tennis courts, up from 21, including a new 2,300-seat sunken stadium. The expansion added a 53,000-square-foot indoor tennis center with six courts and a two-story, 56,000 square-foot clubhouse with a public restaurant. During the tournament, the restaurant is used for player dining, while other spaces are converted for player use as a lounge and recovery room. Fans have access to a new 16,000-square-foot shaded pavilion and a 1,400-seat dining area. Staff also have a new space, a 20,000-square-foot facility management hub.
"Everything had to be ready to go by the first day of August. We could not miss the deadline. Access control is not the simplest thing to accomplish in such a short timeframe. There’s a lot of equipment and electronics that have to be connected."
Robert Nichols | Principal Technical Architect, Beemok Capital
Diverse Credential Needs
To support a modern, secure facility, the access control system had to meet three distinct credential requirements:
- SECURE AND CONVENIENT
- Beemok wanted a streamlined, secure access experience for tournament staff and year-round employees, allowing doors to be opened using smartphones as digital keycards.
- SPECIALIZED CREDENTIALS
- Tournament badges for a significant number of players, families, media, vendors, and VIPs grant access to secure zones like locker rooms or the Performance Center. Integration with a third-party accreditation system ensured only authorized users could enter designated areas.
- TICKETED ACCESS
- The system needed to integrate with ticket-scanning technology, enabling seamless admission to the grounds, suites, and other ticketed areas, while maintaining strict security protocols.
A Compressed Timeline
Construction began immediately after the 2024 tournament in August and had to be finished in time for the 2025 event. The technology infrastructure could only be installed as each new building was completed, adding pressure to an already tight schedule.
THE SOLUTION
A Hardware-Agnostic Ecosystem That Enhances Safety Without Building a Fortress
With the campus expansion, the tournament anticipated larger crowds, expecting a premier fan experience. Athletes, teams, and families now occupy multiple buildings requiring restricted access, along with zones for media, hospitality, and staff. Even more, over 100 new access points were added, increasing security complexity.
Outside of tournament dates, nearly the entire 40-acre campus is open to the public year-round, including the clubhouse restaurant. Managing a large, dynamic environment made physical keys impractical, highlighting the need for an automated, centralized access control system.
To meet these daunting challenges and support continued growth, Nichols and his team selected a best-of-breed, hardware-agnostic platform, replacing legacy proprietary systems with an interoperable, future-ready solution.
The nucleus of the solution is a partnership between Genea and Wavelynx, which developed a custom platform unifying access control and credential management across multiple systems.
Genea’s cloud-native central management platform allows administrators to assign tournament badges to players and mobile credentials to employees, with tailored access levels for each role. This flexibility is supported by an open architecture that includes native integrations with Wavelynx credentials and Meraki video, along with an open API used to connect additional partners such as RFIDentikit (RFID credentials) and Fortress (ticket access).
Genea’s system enabled phased rollouts as buildings were completed, supported by cloud scalability that eliminated the need to deploy on-site servers and allowed most programming to be completed in the cloud before doors were even installed.
The system integrates seamlessly with Wavelynx readers, selected for their ability to process multiple signals simultaneously and support mobile wallets that store digital employee IDs using near-field communication (NFC). Wavelynx leverages MIFARE® DESFire® technology to enable the secure, high-frequency communication required for modern access control.
To ensure smooth operation, Wavelynx and Genea worked closely with Security 101, an integrator that delivers customized physical security systems that integrate access control, video, and monitoring to improve safety and operational visibility, to integrate MIFARE’s nonproprietary technology into the tournament credentials, making it fully compatible with the long-range RFID chips already in use. Wavelynx’s open application programming interface (API) made it simple to add a key set to its readers, creating a single source of truth on Genea’s platform for all access data. Wavelynx’s readers are also a long-term solution, adaptable to the next iteration of credentialing technology.
"Wavelynx’s card readers handle our unique need for multiple credentials, supporting both long-range RFID and NFC,” Nichols said. “Paired with Genea’s hardware-agnostic platform, it gives us a flexible, secure system that’s easy to manage and scale."
Robert Nichols | Principal Technical Architect, Beemok Capital
THE IMPACT
A Proven Formula for Modern Sports Venues
Despite an accelerated 11-month construction schedule, the access control system was fully operational in time for the 2025 tournament. Genea and Wavelynx not only met the timeline, they elevated security across the campus.
Wavelynx installed roughly 125 readers, all centrally managed and monitored through Genea’s platform. The security was invisible but felt. Players can relax in open lounges, confident that the clubhouse and performance centers are protected by high-tech, tamper-resistant access points. The system tracks not only credentialed staff and players but also ticket holders, adding another layer of fan safety.
The tournament welcomed a record-breaking 285,000 attendees—a nearly 40% increase over the previous year, while the Lindner Family Tennis Center evolved into a year-round racquet club with pickleball and padel courts. Staff can now automate building schedules and grant remote access to vendors via smartphone, eliminating the need for physical brass keys.
SETTING A STANDARD FOR WORLD-CLASS, PREMIER EVENTS
The Cincinnati Open has created a smart, scalable, and future-ready security infrastructure, designed to protect players, staff and fans while enhancing operational efficiency and convenience. With these systems in place, the Cincinnati Open sets a new benchmark for premier global tennis events and serves as a model for modern sports venues worldwide.
"We wanted to take a significant leap in security to support the vision of a premier global tennis event. So many projects were implemented that make this place a technological wonderland, and we accomplished that in a very short period of time. That was due to partners like Genea and Wavelynx."
Robert Nichols | Principal Technical Architect, Beemok Capital
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