The Lawrence Tennis Center will be a busy place for the next three days with the start of the Lawrence Open tonight.

Tournament director Bud Pettit scheduled the start of singles matches for today to begin trimming the field.

“We have 61 players entered into the tournament this year – a pretty nice looking draw,” Pettit said.

Matches start at 6 p.m. today, with another round of singles slated for 8 a.m. Saturday.

The doubles matches are slated to start between 10 and 10:30 Saturday morning.

Although he plans to play most of the finals matches on Sunday afternoon – with the possibility of some semifinals for the larger divisions starting in the morning – Pettit said he had to do some reworking on a couple of small divisions.

There will be eight players vying for what Pettit says is “the highest level of tennis we get here” in the men’s open singles division, with ages ranging 18 to 35.

Pettit said he’s hoping the weather will cooperate better than it did last year – raining on both Saturday and Sunday – so he doesn’t have to make scoring adjustments to speed up the matches.