Teaching Tennis

I have loved tennis for as long as I can remember.

My dad introduced me to the game and taught me. Sometimes I’d watch him play doubles with his friends and help out as the ball boy. As I got older they’d occasionally ask me to step in, which made it a good day.

When I was a kid I played in my driveway, bouncing the ball off our stockade fence for hours on end. Sometimes I would, instead, hit the ball up onto our sloped roof and wait for it to bound back down between the dormers before knocking it skyward again. We lived in a two-family house so about half of the rooftop bounces landed above our neighbors’ half. They really liked this.

I remember many matches with my dad on the courts near our house on the Cape. I remember begging for a new racket and him telling me he’d buy me one when I could beat him in 2 out of 3 sets. I don’t think I ever did beat him, though I did eventually get new rackets, a couple of which I use to this day.

I also remember the rage I felt when things didn’t work out for me on the court. Red, burning rage. John McEnroe racket-smashing rage. Some of the most frustrating moments of my life have been on a tennis court. Those fits of rage seemed to always have been followed by an equally strong desire to try again (with a backup racket).

In high school I was on the tennis team. Playing tennis 5 days a week seems an almost incomprehensible privilege to my father-of-3, business-owning, home-owning married almost-37-year-old self of today.

I didn’t play much in college – I still don’t know why – and as an adult I’ve not had much luck finding consistent playing partners. The tennis dark ages.

But alas, the circle of life is working in my favor. No tennis partners? Grow your own!

I now have the privilege of regular outings to our local courts with my 3 kids, tiny tennis rackets in hand. The joy of this new privilege would, of course, have been almost incomprehensible to my 17-year-old high school self.

Besides getting a chance to start knocking 20 years of rust off my tennis game it’s given me a fun new challenge: figuring out how the heck to teach tennis. Which is a little weird because I don’t recall ever finishing learning it myself. Like life I guess. I don’t recall becoming an adult either but here I am, helping fast-growing tiny humans to be people when I barely know what I’m doing myself.