BARNABA SANDRO FAGIOLI: New York

There is a court in New York he will never name.

Not because he is trying to be mysterious. Because if you share the address, as his friend Brian says, you might as well never go back.

Barnaba Fagioli found it about a year ago. Italian born, now settled into New York the way people settle into cities that ask something of them. He works at the intersection of tennis, wine, art and culture. He curates natural wine for galleries and creative spaces. He writes. He builds things slowly and on his own terms.

The unnamed court is where a lot of it comes from.

There are maybe ten or fifteen regulars. No hierarchy, no sign-up sheet, always room for one more. Players rotate in and out regardless of level. Rami holds court there, loud and blunt and exhausting until he isn’t, until the day he apologised for a ball that may or may not have been intentional and everything shifted. If you stay long enough, things change.

“It’s where I found a community,” Barnaba says. “Some of those people helped me through difficult moments I would have otherwise faced alone.”

He spends his days around people obsessed with process. Artists, athletes, winemakers, makers of things that take time. He went to a Tony Lewis opening and stood in front of work where the mistakes and the marks and the layers stay visible, where the artist doesn’t erase what came before. Later that same week he hit with Anthony, eighteen years old, ridiculously good, quiet in that confident tennis player way. Hours and hours of invisible effort behind every shot.

Tennis taught him something those other worlds couldn’t quite reach. Not technique. Not strategy. Consistency. The willingness to come back the next day without needing a reason.

“I don’t get tired of failing,” he says. “I don’t get tired of coming back the next day and trying again. Tennis might be the only thing in my life that I’m willing to pursue every single day without needing motivation.”

He plays daily. He breaks racquets occasionally. It is literally tattooed on his left arm.

On the good days something shifts. The stress and the noise from outside fall away and something else takes over. He describes it like diving underwater. Suddenly you are in a different world. Time disappears. The only thing that exists is the next shot.

He thinks that is why he is obsessed. Some people find that feeling through meditation or reading or yoga. He finds it on a tennis court. Usually the one he won’t name.

Last September, working around the US Open with Palmes, he realised tennis had become more than something he played.

“It was the first time I thought, this is where I belong.”

The feeling followed him. To Los Angeles. To weekends with Broken Rackets. To conversations with people he had only ever known online. At the end of one of those trips, he was offered five more days and a chance to go to Indian Wells. He said no. He was already on the plane home before he understood why that was the wrong answer.

Tomorrow, someone new will probably arrive at the court he won’t name. Someone will leave. Someone will stay longer than they intended.

He’ll be there again.

AMANDA GREELEY: Charleston, South Carolina

She was three years old. Not tall enough to see over the net.

Her grandfather put a racquet in her hands anyway. On the head cover, in the playful handwriting she has loved her whole life, he wrote her a note.

“For Amanda. The first step on your way to Wimbledon. Remember me when you get there. Grandpa.”

He wasn’t a tennis player. He was a sports fan, a lefty like her, someone who saw something in her before she could see it herself. She still has the racquet. She still has the handwriting. That same handwriting found its way quietly into the brand she eventually built, a detail she never planned and can’t quite explain.

“It’s not crazy to believe that racquet changed the course of my life.”

Amanda Greeley founded Spence, a racquet sports apparel brand rooted in the belief that tennis begins with love. She lives in Charleston, runs, swims, moves through the world actively. But the court is its own thing entirely.

“Some days it just flows. On others it’s wildly frustrating. There’s a specific kind of satisfaction that comes from hitting a perfect backhand that I never feel when I’m running.”

She thinks about what the court gives adults that almost nothing else does. The chance to really play. Not for anything in particular. Just for the feeling of it.

“As an adult it’s hard to find arenas where you can really play. I might not even be playing for anything, but there’s always an opportunity to feel like a winner.”

What is tennis to her, really?

“Making contact. With the ball, with yourself, with others. It touches on every feeling. The physical, the mental, the emotional. I hate it. I love it. I never want the game to end.”

Her grandfather never made it to Wimbledon. Neither has she. But something he wrote on a racket cover when she was three years old is still moving through the world.

She is still following its instructions.

Amanda Greeley is the founder of Spence, a racquet sports apparel brand.

KATE: MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

There was a backhand she couldn’t fix.

She had tried everything. The grip. The stance. The point of contact. She would isolate one thing, work on it, decide that wasn’t it, and move to the next. Kate had spent thirty years as an aircraft design engineer, a career built entirely on precision and problem solving, and she brought that same methodical intelligence to the court. If something wasn’t working there was a reason. Find the reason. Fix it. Move on.

The backhand kept breaking down. The frustration built. The harder she thought about it the worse it got.

Then one day she stopped trying. She let the shot happen. And it did, clean and natural, as if her body had been waiting patiently for her mind to get out of the way.

Kate grew up in China, where she became a semiprofessional volleyball player before injury took it from her. She was young when it happened, young enough that the sport was not just something she did but something she was. Losing it meant losing a version of herself she had not finished becoming yet.

She built another life. Thirty years of engineering, countries moved through. London. America. Children raised and grown. And then Covid, and a decision that still sounds a little crazy when she says it out loud. She moved to Australia. Alone. In her fifties.

Tennis was not the plan. It rarely is for the people it takes hold of most completely. It started simply, a way to stay active, a way to meet people in a city that did not know her yet.

Tennis suited her in the same way engineering had. Precision. Repetition. Adjustment. Small variables with large consequences. She studied the game, felt her way into it, and kept showing up. Most people who play against her have no idea who they are facing. They just see a woman who plays powerfully. They don’t see everything that built her.

“There is something about tennis that feels very honest,” she says. “You are alone with yourself out there. Your emotions, your thoughts, your confidence, your fears. Everything shows up.”

She knows what it means to have a body that can do extraordinary things. She also knows what it means to lose that. So when tennis began giving something back, in early mornings on court with the sound of the ball and the laughter of people who had become friends, she recognised what she was feeling. Not exercise. Not competition. Belonging.

She plays every day. Still improving, still discovering, still arriving at moments on court where her body knows before her mind does. “You can still begin again,” she says. “You can still surprise yourself.” The game just asks her to show up, stop thinking, and let something else take over.

She does. Every morning.

Enough to be there again tomorrow.

There is a basket full of balls at the back of the court. Old ones, mostly. The felt worn soft, the bounce flattened out from a thousand repetitions against a thousand different surfaces. You fill it before you start and you empty it by hitting and then you collect them all and fill it again. This is practice. This is most of it.

You fix the backhand and find the footwork was wrong all along. You sort the footwork and realise you’ve been gripping too tight. You loosen the grip and the serve falls apart. You are always, always standing at the beginning of something. The problem doesn’t disappear. It relocates.

Improvement doesn’t reduce the work. It relocates it.

This is the thing nobody tells you about getting better at something. That it doesn’t lighten. That you don’t cross a threshold into ease. That the basket will always need filling, the balls will always need collecting, and tomorrow you will come back and find the same problem waiting in a slightly different place.

And still you come.

Not because it gets easier. Not because one day it will click and stay clicked. You come because the relocating is the point. Because a problem that moves is a problem you’re still in relationship with. Because the court asks the same question every time and you are still, after all of it, interested in your answer.

You fill the basket. You start again.

Enough to come back tomorrow.

YADUSH: INDIA

For 448 days, he lost.

Every morning at 4:30am, he showed up to the court and his partner dismantled him. Not occasionally. Every single time. For a year and a half, the result was never in question.

He had come to tennis at 38, essentially from zero. An age when most people lean into the things they are already good at. He chose instead to be a complete beginner.

“You are never too old to start from zero,” he says. “True growth happens when you have the courage to show up every day knowing you are going to lose.”

On day 449, he won a set.

He still thinks about that morning. Not just because of the victory, but because of everything that made it possible. The patience of his partner, who dismantled him every day and then stayed to rebuild him. The footwork corrections, the technique adjustments, the slow accumulation of something that eventually, quietly, clicked.

Yadush is Head of Global Field Marketing at a technology company in Bengaluru. He runs a small pickle business with his mother. He photographs wildlife. He captained a cricket club and played football on the wing. He is, by his own description, a lifelong athlete with a quieter creative side.

Tennis found him when he needed something that asked for total individual accountability.

“In team sports, you can share the burden. Tennis strips all of that away.”

What the court gives him is harder to name. He tries anyway.

“There is a heavy, often unspoken societal script for a man approaching forty. You are expected to be the anchor. To have all the answers. To be the stoic provider, the leader, the relentless problem-solver.”

The court dismantles all of that. On the baseline he is not a corporate executive. He is not expected to have it figured out. The game demands vulnerability. You are going to miss shots. You are going to be humbled. There is nowhere to hide.

“It is one of the very few spaces in a man’s life where it is perfectly acceptable to struggle openly, to be a student again, and to pour your soul into something just for the pure, unoptimised joy of it.”

He describes tennis as the collision of everything that came before it. The geometric vision of cricket. The fluid improvisation of a football winger. The hyper-focused timing of a wildlife photographer waiting for the perfect frame.

“Finding the art within that chaos is incredibly beautiful.”

What is tennis to him, really?

“It is the great equaliser. It doesn’t care about your job title, your age, or your past successes. It demands respect, focus, and immediate execution.”

He still sets his alarm for 4:30am. He still shows up. The result is no longer certain.

@aces_and_aches

LETSKO: Korea

There was a court he used to walk past.

Every day, during the years when work was everything and time was not his. He never stopped. He just kept walking.

Tennis had found him once before, in 6th grade, a school club, a racket, something that felt good before life decided otherwise. Then years passed. The court was there. He wasn’t.

He lives differently now. Out of Seoul, into the countryside, farming and marketing and time that belongs to him again. And on court, something returns that he didn’t have a word for until he was back on it.

“So much of the day is repeated work,” he says. “There are stretches where my life starts to feel almost dead. The moment I step on court, all of that disappears.”

He calls it spiritual energy. Not the energy that food gives you, something closer to the energy that reminds you why you’re here. The court as the place where the feeling of being alive comes back.

He built Letsko Tennis to document the people who keep showing up. Not the professionals. The everyday players. The ones whose reasons for being on court are quiet and personal and rarely recorded anywhere.

He is one of them.

“Tennis is the rope that pulled me out of a deep darkness, back into the world.”

There was a court he used to walk past. He doesn’t anymore.

Follow Letsko Tennis on Instagram: @letsko_tennis https://blog.naver.com/jonyeok_seoul

It doesn’t, entirely.

There are mornings on court when something works that didn’t work before. Footwork that stopped being something you thought about. A forehand that finally has weight behind it. You didn’t decide this. The body decided, quietly, while you were just showing up.

This is what nobody tells you about starting late. You get to watch it happen. Younger players take the development for granted. It occurs in the background of growing up, indistinguishable from everything else. When you start later, it’s visible. You notice the muscle arriving. You notice the reach extending. The body is doing something, and you are present enough to pay attention.

A body that has lived a while doesn’t need to be told what to do. It has already learned patience in other rooms of life. You give it the court, the repetition, the time. It figures things out you didn’t ask it to.

That’s the surprise. Not limitation. Development. Just later than expected, and all the more interesting for it.

Enough to trust it again tomorrow.

The walk back to the baseline, the turn of the racquet in the hand, the small adjustments that happen without much thought. In a lesson, it might be the brief pause before the next feed. In a rotation, the moment waiting to step in. Nothing is happening in any obvious way, and yet something is always unfolding.

Some players move through it quickly, as though the previous point has already been set aside. Others take their time, lingering just slightly, letting the last ball sit with them a moment longer than it needs to. You begin to notice this without meaning to, the way someone resets, or doesn’t.

There is the player who replays the miss, even if only for a second. The one who lets it go before it has properly landed. The one who makes a small adjustment, the grip, the strings, their footing, as though that might change what comes next.

None of it is deliberate. It is simply what fills the space.

The rhythm of the game is not only in the rally itself, but in how each point is left behind and how the next one is approached. Some carry things with them. Others don’t. Most sit somewhere in between, even if they would describe it differently.

You don’t speak about it, but after a while you begin to feel it.

Enough to leave one point and step into the next without carrying all of it with you.

Enough to do it again.

Not immediately. The first few swings have a slight strangeness to them, even if you played yesterday. The grip feels almost unfamiliar, the weight slightly different from how you remembered it. The body takes a moment to recalibrate.

And then it doesn’t.

The grip tape tells a story if you look at it. Where the wear is heaviest says something about how you hold through contact, where your hand shifts under pressure, which shots you hit most. Players who have never noticed this would recognise it immediately if someone pointed to it. The racquet knows things about your game that you haven’t consciously registered.

The strings are a different kind of record. Fresh, they have a crispness that feels almost too cooperative. After a few sessions they settle into something more familiar, a tension that has learned your game slightly, that responds in a way a new string bed doesn’t quite yet. Most players have a preference they can’t fully articulate. Not too fresh, not too dead. A sweet spot that feels right without explanation.

The grip itself accumulates. Sweat, pressure, hours of play. Some players change it constantly, chasing a cleanliness that fades within a session. Others let it go until it is almost unrecognisable, until the texture has worn smooth and the original white has become something else entirely. They will tell you they play better this way. They are probably right.

There is something in the handling of a racquet that bypasses thought entirely. The way the hand settles into position before the mind has decided anything. The slight adjustment at the last moment that happens too fast to be conscious. The body has learned the object so thoroughly that it stops being an object. It becomes an extension of something.

You only notice the racquet when something is off. When the grip is too slick, when the strings have gone past their point, when the balance feels wrong in a way you can’t name. The rest of the time it disappears into the game.

That disappearance is the point. Years of repetition until the thing in your hand is no longer separate from the hand itself.

Enough to pick it up again tomorrow.

Not the obvious things. Not whether they are competitive or easygoing, serious or relaxed. Those reveal themselves in the first few games and mean less than you’d expect. What the game shows you is something quieter. The way someone receives a bad call. Whether they take their time between points or rush back to the baseline as though speed might change the outcome. What they do in the moment after they miss badly.

There is a particular kind of player who gets louder when things are going wrong. The shots get bigger, the apologies more frequent, the energy between you shifts into something that needs managing. And there is another kind who goes still. Who retreats somewhere internal and plays from there, barely speaking until the racquet goes back in the bag.

You notice the player who always finds something to say between points, keeping the air between you easy and warm. And the one who needs quiet, who is elsewhere during the game and only fully arrives at themselves once it is over.

You notice how someone responds to a shot that beats them cleanly. Whether they acknowledge it or look away. Whether there is a real generosity in them when the game is flowing or whether they are only comfortable when they are ahead.

The social masks that work everywhere else don’t quite hold up under the specific pressure of play. Something more honest comes through. Not because tennis is a test of character exactly. But because it creates the right conditions for character to surface.

You can know someone for years and learn something new about them in a single set. The rally reveals things. So does the silence between points. So does the walk to the net at the end.

And afterwards, over coffee or on the drive home, you carry a slightly fuller picture of the person you just played.

Enough to want to play them again tomorrow.

Not fully present. Not yet playing. Somewhere between the day you left behind and the game that hasn’t started yet.

The warm-up has its own quality. Unhurried, slightly uncertain. The first few balls go back and forth with a looseness that feels almost careless, as though the body needs convincing that this is really happening. Footwork is approximate. Timing is slightly off. The ball comes off the strings in a way that feels unfamiliar, even if you played just a few days ago.

This is normal. Most players know it, even if they don’t say it.

There is a temptation to rush through this part. To get to the actual game, the real play, the moment when everything is working. But the warm-up resists that. It moves at its own pace, and the players who fight it tend to stay tight longer than those who let it unfold.

Something happens around the ten minute mark, sometimes sooner. A shot lands cleanly. The footwork adjusts without thinking. The ball starts to feel familiar in the way it only does when the body has remembered what it’s doing.

It isn’t dramatic. There’s no obvious moment of transition. But at some point the warm-up becomes something else, and you realise the day has quietly shifted.

What the warm-up actually is, is an arrival. Not at the court, which happened earlier, but at the game itself. The drive over, the shoes laced, the racquet out of the bag. Those are the physical steps. The warm-up is the internal one.

It is the body catching up to where you already are.

Some players barely notice it. Others are attuned to every stage of it, tracking the loosening as it happens, aware of when the timing settles and the movement becomes easier.

Either way, it is the most honest part of tennis. Before tactics, before score, before any of the small pressures that come with actual play. Just the body finding its way back to something it already knows.

And when it does, that is enough.

Enough to come back tomorrow.