Approach the guard gate at Kiawah Island during the second week of October and you might hear an unfamiliar exchange. A driver in the left lane tells the attendant they are headed to the Roy Barth Tennis Center, nothing more, and the gate lifts. The car is not visiting Kiawah. It is finishing a match that started across the marsh on Seabrook Island.
That day-pass workaround exists because the Fleming Open, Seabrook's signature tennis tournament, has stopped fitting on its own courts. The Seabrook Island Racquet Club has fifteen Har-Tru clay courts, more than enough for the tournament's early decades. For 2026, the event needed Kiawah's courts too, with select matches scheduled at 1 Sanctuary Beach Drive and guests waved through with instructions to identify themselves as tennis center arrivals only.
The scale explains why. Now in its 42nd year and running October 6 through 11, 2026, the tournament drew recognition from the International Tennis Federation, which gave it the 2025 Tournament Recognition Award for player experience and satisfaction. For 2026, its singles and doubles events were elevated to a USTA Level 2 sanctioned tournament, a jump from the state-level status the event carried in recent years. Between 350 and 400 players are expected from across the country and abroad, competing in men's and women's divisions spanning age 30 to over 80, alongside a Level 1 ITF mixed doubles draw. Registration closed September 24, at a flat fee of $170 for two events, and it closed early enough that anyone hoping to enter this year already missed the window.
"We're honored to welcome players from around the world back to Seabrook Island for another exceptional week of competition," said Laura Ferreira, the club's director of racquet sports, who coordinates the tournament with the USTA and Tournament Chair Mary Anne Rayfield alongside a team of resident volunteers.
The overflow to Kiawah's courts is not the first time the two islands' tennis worlds have mixed. Alan Fleming, a Seabrook resident and nationally ranked player whose competitive history included matches at Forest Hills before it gave way to the US Open, founded the tournament in 1981 with his wife Sally. He co-chaired it in its early years with fellow resident Tom Kent, and the event ran without interruption until Hurricane Hugo forced a two-year pause starting in 1989. Alan's son Peter Fleming, who won more than 50 doubles titles including four at Wimbledon and three at the US Open with John McEnroe, served as Seabrook's touring pro during the same stretch that Roscoe Tanner held the equivalent role at Kiawah. The two staged exhibition matches between the islands to promote both as tennis destinations, and the tournament's own history page repeats the local claim that Roscoe won in three sets whenever the exhibition landed at Kiawah, and Peter won by the same score whenever it landed at Seabrook.
Seabrook Island is a private, gated community, accessible only to property owners, club members, and their registered guests. For most of the year, that boundary holds firm. The Fleming Open's growth is the first crack in it each fall, and it runs in one direction: Seabrook's tournament borrowing another private island's courts to handle its own field.
Six weeks later, the boundary opens the other way.
| Event | Dates | Where it lands |
|---|---|---|
| Fleming Open | October 6-11, 2026 | Seabrook Island Racquet Club, with overflow matches at Kiawah's Roy Barth Tennis Center |
| Bohicket Half Marathon and 5K | Saturday, November 21, 2026 | Course through Seabrook's marsh and beach roads, finish line at the Freshfields Village Green |
The Bohicket Half Marathon and 5K started in 2010 as a 5K and 10K built to give the Lowcountry running community a well-run race, and it has grown into a half marathon and 5K that draws support from the Seabrook Island Community Association, the Town of Seabrook Island, the Kiawah-Seabrook Exchange Club, the Charleston Animal Society, and the Charleston Running Club. Where the Fleming Open sends Seabrook traffic into a neighboring private club, the Bohicket race sends Seabrook's own course out to a public finish. Runners cover sea island marshes and a canopy of historic trees, passing island deer and native birdlife along the way, before crossing the line not behind a gate but on the open lawn of the Village Green at Freshfields, where anyone shopping or eating lunch that Saturday can watch them come in.
The race's most specific detail belongs to the horses. The Equestrian Center sits along part of the route, and its horses have become known for running alongside runners on their side of the fence as the field heads for the finish. It is the kind of detail that never shows up in a tournament bracket or a USTA sanctioning announcement, and it only happens because the course runs past a working stable rather than around one.
Between October 6 and November 21, Seabrook's fall calendar carries two events that move its private boundary in opposite directions within the same six weeks. The tennis tournament grew until its own fifteen courts could not hold it, so its overflow crossed into a neighboring island's private club. The road race stayed community-built from its 2010 start, so its finish line crosses out to the public green outside the gates. Neither event required rewriting anything else about how Seabrook works day to day. The gate still checks every car. The club still requires a membership. But for one week in October and one Saturday in November, the line that usually holds moves, in each case toward a place it does not normally reach.
If you're weighing what fall actually looks like on Seabrook Island, from tournament week traffic to the marina's rhythm ahead of the holidays, Mary Catherine Masi can walk you through the calendar in more detail before you plan a visit or a move.
