Welcome to Court Date

Join me on a journey of being sort of OK at tennis.

How stock photographers think all matches end. (Photo by Jeffery Erhunse on Unsplash)

I started playing tennis because I was bored.

It was late 2021 and even though things in California had technically reopened, everything still felt tenuous. The promise of the “hot vax summer” had faded quickly; my two-year-old son had to wear a mask to preschool, and I didn’t feel comfortable going back to an indoor gym. (And there were only so many Peloton rides I could do.)

So I texted the number on a sign at the public courts near me and started taking tennis lessons. I had taken some lessons as a kid, at summer camp and at my town’s indoor tennis court (I grew up outside of Boston—I assumed indoor tennis courts were standard), but had never played in a match. I didn’t even know how to serve. Still, I figured I must have some muscle memory. How hard could it be?

Turns out, it was very hard.

Taking up a new sport after the age of 40, especially one as complex as tennis, is a true exercise in humility. I always enjoyed exercising, and considered myself to be in decent shape, but tennis requires a level of connection between your brain and your body that I wasn’t used to. It was easy to zone out while jogging or swimming laps. Yoga required concentration, but in a way that made me feel calm and centered. Tennis felt like playing chess while doing a HIIT class. It was mentally and physically exhausting.

I loved it, and was terrible at it. It was a disorienting feeling to handle a racket that wasn’t doing the things I wanted it to. My brain was telling my body to use the racket to hit the ball over the net and keep it in the court, but my body was like “LA LA LA” and instead the balls would go out, or into the net.

There was just so much to remember. Don’t get too close to the ball. Don’t have your racket too open, but don’t have it too closed. Follow through! Turn your body. Well, not that much. Don’t hit the ball too late. But don’t hit the ball too early, either! Hold your racket with one grip for forehand, and a different grip for backhand. And that was just the groundstrokes.

I thought that I would be satisfied with just taking lessons and eventually, maybe getting good enough to keep a rally going for four or five hits back and forth. I wasn’t going to compete, I told myself. Joining a team felt like too much pressure. I didn’t want to be accountable to other people. I just wanted to be outside and hit some balls and move my body.

If that had really been where my tennis journey had ended then I wouldn’t be writing this, or thinking that I had enough to say about tennis that I could start a whole newsletter about it. But the truth is, three and a half years after I picked up a racket, tennis has taken over my life. I joined a team, and then another team, and then I became a team captain, and that opened up a whole other aspect of my tennis obsession.

I played 46 matches in 2024. I started recognizing players from other teams and learned a whole new vocabulary. She’s good, but she struggles at the baseline. Watch out for her at the net — she will always try to poach. She makes bad line calls. I memorized the USTA rule book. As my life, and the world, started crumbling around me, tennis was the only thing besides my family I wanted to care about. It was an obsession and a need. I learned to be okay with being obsessive, a word that came with so much baggage and judgment but which was now bringing me calm.

I learned that other people had had the same experience. We became annoying tennis people, but we had, also, collectively decided that this sport that would frustrate us endlessly was also endlessly fascinating and beautifully complicated.

So that’s what Court Date is: a chronicle of doing something that I love that I am objectively just OK at, acknowledging my body’s limits while also pushing them, getting injured and recovering, realizing that I learn from losses but also from wins. An analysis of my own tennis matches and the quest to improve. The eternal question of whether you are ever too old to learn something new. And what it’s like to help build a community of women who were maybe also searching for the same things I was.

I’ve thought about doing this for a long time, and for a long time I also talked myself out of it, and then I decided that if there is one reader of this newsletter, and it is myself, that is okay. (A little depressing, but okay.) Life has been hard lately and this is already bringing me joy. Consider it a respite from everything else. In here we talk about tennis, because I spend too much of my other waking hours stressed and worrying about everything else. And yes of course the personal is political and I’m not going to ignore what’s going on in the world and the phrase “joy is an act of resistance” makes me want to vom, but I will—mostly!—be talking about tennis.

Finally, in case this was not clear, this is not a newsletter about professional tennis. There are plenty of other places where you can read interviews with Iga Swiatek and analysis of Indian Wells matches. I will leave the professional takes to the professionals.

A bit of housekeeping: I do not have payments turned on for Court Date, but may at some point in the future. If you’d like to pledge your support now, you won’t be charged until I turn payments on.

Court Date will come out weekly. For now. There might be more, or less, to say.

In the meantime, I’ll see you on the court.