Tennis Great Pam Shriver Boosts Wildfire Recovery Effort in Los Angeles
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Pam Shriver built her legendary tennis career with her serve-and-volley game.
Now, she’s all about service. The Hall of Fame player-turned-broadcaster is pouring her efforts these days into helping the Pacific Palisades and Altadena communities of Los Angeles rebuild in the wake of the apocalyptic wildfires in January.
Shriver and her friend Ilise Friedman are the driving force behind Village Rising, a foundation dedicated to revitalizing communities disrupted by crisis or disaster.
Specifically, they’re raising money for schools and sports programs in the affected communities, and leaning on tennis to help generate those funds.
“Tennis is unbelievable,” said Shriver, who has an Olympic gold medal and 22 Grand Slam doubles titles. “It’s global, coed, equal … and we stand for things. That’s just perfect for this. Not just tennis, what happens on the actual courts, but the sport itself represents hope and resilience.”
Friedman, who has a background in fundraising, launched the nonprofit in 2018 in response to the Woolsey Fire, another blaze that started in Los Angeles County. She later aided victims of the 2019 Getty Fire that erupted west of UCLA, before putting the group on pause during the pandemic.
When wildfires swept through California again this year, friends from around the world reached out wanting to help. That surge of support led Friedman to restart Village Rising — this time with Shriver, who now serves as the organization’s president.
Today, Village Rising operates largely on volunteer efforts.
“Tennis is our through line,” Friedman said. “Our mantra is, ‘Build a court, build a community.’”
While on a stopover vacation in Hawaii en route to the Australian Open, Shriver learned wildfires were tearing through her city.
As much as she loves her job as a tennis broadcaster, her heart was back home where countless friends in the Palisades had lost their homes in the catastrophe. What’s more, Shriver, who lives in neighboring Brentwood, was under mandatory evacuation orders.
She put her business life on hold, flew back, packed the family cars and checked into a Marina del Rey hotel. While she was staying there, her son’s Dodge Durango was stolen from the parking lot. Inside were many of her most prized championship trophies — five from the French Open, seven from the Australian Open and one from Wimbledon.
The SUV was never recovered, but about 10 days later the trophies mysteriously reappeared, discarded behind the hotel.
“If it was either the car or the trophies that would never come back, it worked out much better for me,” she said. “My son might argue otherwise.”
Compared with what others endured, the stolen car was only a minor setback. That perspective fuels Village Rising, which focuses on finding overlooked parks and schools damaged by the fire, raising funds and getting grants quickly out the door.
“We want the money to reach where it’s needed right away,” Shriver said. “We don’t want to sit on it.”
The goals of Village Rising include refurbishing the courts at the Pacific Palisades Tennis Center and restoring a little-known private court at Will Rogers State Park that hasn’t been used since the 1950s.
Shriver visited the Palisades Park & Recreation Center, where one set of courts is back up and running, and another is stripped bare and was used as a staging area for the Army Corps of Engineers.
There, under a layer of thick gray ash, she found a Penn tennis ball, a surviving relic from the historic disaster. Seeing that put a tremble in her voice. It’s a moment she has often experienced while touring the impacted areas.
“The actual sport courts out there are fine,” she said. “It was the nets, the windscreens, the fencing that were gone. But the courts themselves were intact. There’s something symbolic about that. It’s the promise of resilience.”
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This story was originally published by The Spun on Dec 9, 2025, where it first appeared in the Tennis section. Add The Spun as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
