MONIKA, MILAN

Two tennis courts on the Athenian Riviera, gardens on every side. Monika was there for a single day, a layover between a flight from Milan and a boat through the Ionian islands. She noticed the seating around the courts and the small pro shop stocked with vitamins and Wilson gear.

That’s mostly how she moves through the world. A hotel gym in Comporta that opens straight onto pine trees. A rooftop in Bali where the walls turn terracotta as the light shifts through the afternoon. She trained in architecture and interior design at UT Austin, and the habit never left her. She still reads a room, or a court, by its surfaces, its light, what surrounds it, even the sound it makes.

That eye came second, though. Tennis came first. A racquet in her hand at three, competitive through her teens, then a lower-back injury at fifteen that wouldn’t fully resolve. She kept trying to play through it for a few years anyway. By the time university started, tennis had gone quiet almost completely.

It came back in London, for practical reasons. She had a new job and wanted to meet people and see the city differently, so she started looking for courts. The people arrived with the courts, and the city arrived with the people.

London didn’t hold her. She left interior design behind and moved to Milan instead, drawn to a way of living where beauty was built into the everyday rather than reserved for special occasions, and stubborn enough to want to learn a third language for no better reason than wanting to. It was in Milan that tennis became her profession rather than her hobby. She now works as a creative consultant to sport and wellness brands, including Broken Rackets, a global tennis culture platform, shaping how a sport she grew up inside presents itself to the world, a sport that has, in her lifetime, become noticeably more fashionable than it once was.

None of that follows her onto the court. “When I play, it’s just tennis to me,” she says. Somewhere in the middle of a real point, instinct takes over and the analysing stops. It is one of the only places she knows where presence isn’t something she has to try for.

For a while, she thought tennis, design and travel needed to add up to a single explainable thing. She has stopped looking for the theory. “The connection is simple,” she says. “Passion.”

She calls tennis an old friend, the kind that survives long absences without asking for an explanation. Though she’s quick to add that, mid-match, when things are going badly, it can feel like the opposite. Both are true.

The court is the constant. Everything around it keeps changing.

Monika writes about tennis, design and travel on her own Substack, Moving by Design.

JON, BROOKLYN

Jon was three years old when a racquet was put in his hand. He never gave it back.

He grew up in a multiracial household, moving between worlds that didn’t always have a name for what he was. He was looking, the way everyone looks at that age, for something that felt like his. Something with a code, a set of rules, an unspoken understanding between the people who belonged to it.

Tennis gave him that.

Not the trophies. Not the rankings. The way you carry yourself on court. The way you treat your opponent. The language players speak to each other without speaking. The thing that happens in the first few minutes of hitting with someone new, when you both understand, without saying anything, exactly who you are dealing with. He had found his culture. He just hadn’t expected it to come with a racquet.

He played competitively for years, then spent a decade teaching the game. Became a hitting partner for a pro. Moved through the tennis world the way someone moves through a place they love, slowly, paying attention, not in a hurry to leave.

It was in those years on court with ordinary people that he found the moments he still carries.

There was a father going through a divorce who wanted to learn tennis. Not for fitness. Not for competition. To have something to share with his kids again. Jon taught him. Watched him find his footing on court the same way he was trying to find his footing everywhere else. Tennis became the bridge between a man and his children at the moment they needed one most.

There was a junior player preparing to apply for college. Talented but uncertain. He needed more than coaching. He needed someone who believed in what he could become off the court as well as on it. Jon wrote his admission recommendation letter.

There was a kid going through something she couldn’t name out loud. Something difficult and private and heavy. She came to the court anyway. Jon let the court be what it needed to be for her. A place where none of it had to be spoken. Where the ball going back and forth was enough.

He thinks about all three of them still.

Tennis gave each of them something different. What it gave Jon was the understanding that the game was never really about the game. It was about what happened between people because of it. The unspoken language. The safe space.

He still plays. When he strips everything away, no camera, nothing to prove, nothing to build, he says a kid shows up. Present, curious, emotionally raw. Beneath that kid, though, is still a serious competitor. The desire to win never fully goes quiet. He is still learning to let the kid stay.

On the days when he manages it, when the kid and the competitor find a way to coexist, he describes the feeling as an unlikely combination. A kill switch that fires, deep and instinctive. And underneath it, stillness. Inner peace. Tennis as spiritual experience. He means that literally. The game showed him how he operated. How he processed emotion, handled pressure, moved through difficulty.

He is building something now. Something for players in New York, built not around skill level but around common ground. The idea underneath it is the same one the game taught him years ago on court with a divorced father, a nervous junior, a kid who needed somewhere safe. The right match is rarely just about tennis. It is about who you end up talking to afterwards. Where the conversation goes. What stays.

The court is where relationships start. Not where they end.

Enough to be on court again tomorrow.

I wasn’t at the US Open this year.

I was in Melbourne, watching from the other side of the world. The matches, obviously, but increasingly everything happening around them.

My feed began filling with tennis. Not just the tournament itself, or the campaigns that inevitably arrive with a Grand Slam, but everything gathering around it across New York. Racquets were being wrapped. T-shirts printed. Newspapers passed around. Public courts turned into meeting places. Coffee came with something to read.

I started saving things.

At first I thought I was collecting interesting activations.

By the end of the fortnight, I realised I was watching something else.

The US Open created the gravity, but much of the interesting cultural activity around it came from people bringing their own worlds to tennis rather than trying to look like the US Open.

Racquet Club at the Seaport

Racquet probably made the biggest physical statement.

For 21 days, Racquet Club at the Seaport turned part of Lower Manhattan into something between a tennis club, magazine, shop and social space. There was a full-size court, clubhouse, retail, screenings, conversations, clinics, parties and somewhere to have a drink afterwards.

But it was the programming that made it interesting.

One day might bring a podcast recording, another a film screening, a Babolat playtest or an Overset grip station. There was a one-point tournament with Bageled NYC. People could play, watch, listen, browse or simply spend time there.

From Melbourne, it looked less like a conventional activation and more like Racquet had made its editorial world physical.

The most convincing things I saw weren’t borrowing tennis for a fortnight. They felt like extensions of something that already existed.

Hard Court, in the room

Jessica Schiffer’s Hard Court brings a fashion and business journalist’s eye to tennis, reporting on the people, deals and cultural shifts shaping the game beyond the baseline.

During the Open, the community forming around it became physical too.

For Hard Court’s inaugural cocktail party, Schiffer brought together writers and creators, agents, brand executives and others shaping the culture around the game. She has written that she wanted to create the kind of room she wished existed more often in tennis, one where people from different corners of the game felt equally welcome and might actually meet one another.

Hard Court had spent the year reporting on the people, ideas and changes happening around tennis. For one night, some of that world was simply in the same room.

The publication wasn’t only documenting a culture. It was beginning to help bring one together.

A court was remembered before it was renewed

At Marcy Playground in Brooklyn, photographer Vicente Muñoz documented the public courts in their final days before they were refurbished.

During the Open, those photographs became Marcy, an exhibition at Nike NYC’s 47 Chrystie space, accompanied by a free zine collecting and archiving memories of the park.

The worn surface. The faded markings. The court before the improvement.

What stayed with me was the decision to photograph it at all.

Tennis has a fascination with immaculate surfaces: fresh lines, perfect grass, untouched clay. But most of us experience the game somewhere else entirely. Courts with cracks, fading paint, old nets and years of other people’s matches embedded in them.

Here, the worn court wasn’t simply something to fix. Someone thought it was worth recording first.

And perhaps that’s the more familiar version of a tennis court anyway. Not centre court before the first ball is struck, but the places most of us actually play. Used, weathered and imperfect.

Sometimes all that use is exactly what gives a court its story.

The ordinary rituals

Some of the ideas I kept returning to were much smaller.

Overset makes patterned overgrips. At Racquet’s Seaport club, its Wrap & Rally put the product into use. Racquets were regripped on site, with players choosing an Overset grip around the on-court activity.

Elsewhere, reString and Valldoreix built a pop-up around restringing. Players could bring in their own racquets and have them restrung with reString strings while learning more about the product.

Different brands, different scales, but the same thing interested me.

They didn’t need to invent much entertainment around the product. The doing was the interesting part.

Choose something. Hand over something you already own. Watch someone work on it. Leave with it slightly changed.

Those ordinary rituals around tennis have an intimacy that perhaps gets overlooked when the focus is always on the match itself.

Wrapping a grip. Choosing a string. Packing a bag. Tying your shoes.

They’re small acts, but they are part of how people live the game.

Something worth keeping

Yonex opened a Coffee House on Mott Street.

There were racquets and product, coffee and Yonex Edition No. 1, a zine made with The Second Serve. Inside were player interviews, photography and stories about equipment and the people behind it.

It was something to take away and read.

Come in for coffee. Find a racquet. Pick up something to read. Leave carrying a little more than you expected.

Temporary spaces disappear quickly. A physical object extends the encounter.

A publication ends up on a coffee table. A photograph gets pinned to a wall. A T-shirt gets worn again six months later.

Perhaps that’s why some of the smallest objects from the fortnight felt more memorable than the largest installations.

The Unofficial Shop

One idea I kept coming back to was The Unofficial Shop, created by Tennis T-Shirts with Complex.

For five days on Broadway, it brought together 32 collaborators from across tennis, fashion, art and culture to create more than 50 T-shirt designs.

What interested me was who got to be in the room.

Alongside more recognisable names were smaller independent tennis brands and creative projects. Some I knew. Some I didn’t. That was part of the appeal.

Rather than one big brand interpreting tennis for everyone, the shop gave a collection of smaller voices space to show what tennis looked like through their eyes.

Visitors chose a graphic and a shirt and had it printed on demand. So the souvenir wasn’t really the US Open T-shirt. It was whichever version of tennis you happened to connect with.

There’s something interesting about that at a moment when so many small tennis brands, publications and creative projects seem to be appearing.

And maybe that is partly what “unofficial” allows.

Not anti-tournament. Not trying to compete with the US Open. Just enough space around something enormous for smaller voices to make things in response to it.

The Open, outside the Open

By the end of the fortnight, I had saved far more than I could ever fit here.

There were independent brands sharing spaces, products being personalised, books and magazines appearing around the game, postcards, disposable cameras, match-used balls, trading cards, coffee and objects made from old tennis nets.

Some were polished. Some were tiny. Some probably reached only a roomful of people.

Together, though, they made New York feel as though the Open had escaped the grounds.

That might be the thing I found most interesting from the other side of the world.

A Grand Slam is enormous enough to create its own cultural orbit. For a few weeks, tennis becomes a language lots of different people are suddenly speaking. The interesting part is what happens when they speak it in their own accent.

What connected the things I kept saving wasn’t really scale or budget. Each came from somewhere that already had its own point of view.

A publication remained a publication. A photographer photographed. A grip company wrapped racquets. Independent designers made their own souvenirs.

The Open simply gave them a moment in which tennis mattered a little more than usual.

From Melbourne, I found myself wondering less about how any of these ideas could be replicated here and more about what might emerge around our own tennis summer in our own way.

Melbourne’s own publications, designers, players, clubs, cafés, photographers, makers and communities finding their way into the game.

Because perhaps the most interesting thing happening around the US Open wasn’t any single activation I saved.

It was seeing how much room there still is around tennis for people to make something of their own.

New York’s fortnight is almost over.

The season turns south.

And January suddenly doesn’t feel very far away.

The Pull Towards Play began with a simple question: what keeps bringing people back to the court?

The first ten answers came from Korea, Bengaluru, Melbourne, Charleston, New York, Shanghai, Brooklyn, Madrid and São Paulo. They are stories about persistence, memory, identity, creativity, family and the strange hold a game can have over a life.

Collected here are the first ten.

001: LETSKO, KOREA

He walked past the same court every day for years during a time when work was everything. One day, he stopped walking past it.

Read Letsko’s story →

002: YADUSH, BENGALURU, INDIA

He came to tennis at 38, from zero, and lost every single morning for 448 days. He kept setting his alarm for 4:30am anyway.

Read Yadush’s story →

003: KATE, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

She spent thirty years solving problems other people couldn’t. The one thing she couldn’t fix was a backhand. Until she stopped trying.

Read Kate’s story →

004: AMANDA, SOUTH CAROLINA

Her grandfather wrote her a note on a racquet cover when she was three years old. She still has the racquet. She is still following its instructions.

Read Amanda’s story →

005: BARNABA, NEW YORK

He found a court in New York he refuses to name. If you share the address, as his friend says, you might as well never go back.

Read Barnaba’s story →

006: YOYO, SHANGHAI

Behind a camera, she chooses what enters the frame. On court, she doesn’t get that choice. Everything enters.

Read Yoyo’s story →

007: EVAN, BROOKLYN

He waited for someone else to make the kind of tennis stories he wanted to see. Eventually, he realised that maybe he was the person who was supposed to make them.

Read Evan’s story →

008: MADISON, MELBOURNE

Her mother yelled from the sidelines once when she was twelve. She has never forgotten it. At thirty-three weeks pregnant, she was still on court.

Read Madison’s story →

009: MRKA, MADRID

His father was his favourite player. Not Federer. Not Nadal. His father. That is where it began.

Read MRKA’s story →

010: DIEGO, SÃO PAULO

He almost went professional at rugby before an injury changed everything. Of all the sports that followed, tennis is the only one he has never stopped.

Read Diego’s story →

The Pull Towards Play continues.

If you have a story about what keeps bringing you back to the court, reach out as I’d love to hear it.

DIEGO, SAO PAULO

He was seven years old.

His parents were watching from the sidelines. He was about to play his first championship match and the only thing he could think about was not disappointing them.

He lost. Forty years later, he still remembers it.

Diego Jimenez is half Spanish, half Brazilian, based in São Paulo. He leads partnerships for Racquet Magazine across Latin America and runs his own sports marketing agency. His professional life is built entirely around tennis. But before any of that, there was a boy on a court worrying about the wrong thing.

Tennis found him at seven, at the country club where his parents were members. It was never the only sport. Football, handball, judo, swimming, basketball. He played everything. He came close to going professional in rugby.

Then came the injury.

An open fracture of the right ankle. A bone puncturing through the sock. His rugby career ended in that moment. It was a year before he could return to sport. He chose swimming first, afraid of what might happen to his ankle on a court. Slowly, carefully, he made his way back. Tennis was the first court sport he returned to.

Tennis was still there.

Of everything he has played, tennis is the one he kept returning to. Through the rugby years, after the injury, and eventually into a career built around the sport.

That last part is complicated.

He tells candidates who interview with him and say they want to work in sport because they love it: be careful with that. It can be the biggest heartbreak of your life.

He means it. Working inside sport changes the way you see it, especially when money is involved. The thing you loved becomes something else. The uncomplicated joy of simply playing becomes harder to find.

He finds it anyway. Every day.

“Playing tennis is my meditation.”

On court it is automatic. He likes playing people he has never played before. They surprise him, hitting shots his regular partners would never attempt. After forty years he still finds something unexpected in a stranger across the net. He stays for the beers and the conversation afterwards. That, he says, is the best part of a tennis day.

He has seen tennis from almost every angle. A seven-year-old losing his first match. The 2023 US Open final from court side. The biggest stage the sport has.

The court feels the same in all of them. Once play begins, titles disappear. Everyone starts at love all.

Tennis was still there.

It still is.

MRKA, MADRID

His father is his favourite player. Not Federer. Not Nadal. His father. That is where tennis began for Lucas, on a court somewhere in Madrid, watching the person he admires most move across it. The game came to him the way the most important things do. Through someone you love before you understand why.

MRKA is the name he goes by. His work lives at the intersection of tennis, design, typography, and a kind of visual intelligence that doesn’t sit comfortably in any single category. He hand paints distorted court markings. He designs non-fictional tournament graphics. He builds entire worlds around the game: objects, visors, grips, sweaters, things that feel less like products and more like artefacts from a universe that runs parallel to professional tennis but operates by completely different rules.

The most talked about of these worlds is Hard Court, an immersive installation at Casa Axis in Valencia commissioned by Felipe Pantone. MRKA painted the tennis court by hand, distorting the lines, breaking the geometry, turning infrastructure into art. Parts of it he drew with his non-dominant hand deliberately. He wanted the lines to stay imperfect. He wanted the immediacy. He understood that control, taken too far, kills the thing you are trying to make.

‘Tennis High’ is what he calls the moment on court when everything clicks. You are suddenly hypnotised by a good ball exchange. The thinking stops. Something else takes over.

He keeps playing despite tendonitis in his right hand. He keeps playing the way anyone keeps doing the thing that chose them before they chose it.

Tennis saved his life.

He doesn’t explain that. He doesn’t need to.

Enough to be on court again tomorrow.

MADISON, MELBOURNE

There is a memory she can’t shake.

She is twelve. Maybe fourteen. Playing on a Saturday morning on a synthetic court. Her mother is watching from the sidelines. This was not a regular occurrence. Full-time worker, single mother of three, there were groceries to buy and a house to clean. Saturday morning tennis was usually someone else’s shift.

But she was there that day.

The match had gone to deuce and back again more times than anyone wanted to count. Madison couldn’t close it. And then from the sidelines, her mother’s voice cut through.

“Finish it, Madison.”

She probably just wanted to get to the shops. She almost certainly has no memory of it now. But in that moment it felt like the whole world was watching. Madison hit the best drop shot of her life. The ball kissed the court and died. Her opponent couldn’t reach it.

She didn’t know it then, but her mother had given her something she would carry with her.

She filed it away somewhere deep and kept going.

Twelve years in real estate came next. She was successful by most measures and increasingly unhappy by her own. Some mornings she would take annual leave simply to avoid another day of it. To create a little space. To breathe.

Then life became harder still.

Somewhere in that difficult stretch, she found her way back to something she had left behind without quite meaning to.

She went back to tennis.

The court gave her something the rest of her life couldn’t. The aliveness of it. The way the mind has to be completely present, tracking the ball, reading the court, finding the gap. The way you can wallop a ball when you are angry or sad and feel something genuinely shift.

She found the right club, the right people.

She kept showing up.

She was thirty-three weeks pregnant.

Still showing up.

Still attacking the ball the same way she always had. Her body had changed. Her game hadn’t.

Out on court with her unborn child, she thought about what she was already passing on.

She hoped she was making a future tennis player.

Or maybe she was passing on something else entirely.

That you show up.

That you finish it.

Enough to be there again tomorrow.

She kept playing until she was full term.

Then her daughter, Edelene Mary, arrived.

Madison finished it.

EVAN COLE, BROOKLYN

In 2015, Dustin Brown beat Rafa Nadal at Wimbledon.

It was a second round match that had no right to be what it became. Brown, dreadlocked and unpredictable, playing the kind of tennis that looked like it was being invented in real time. Evan watched it and kept wanting more.

He found Serena next. Watched everything. Went down rabbit holes. Found the YouTube channels with five minutes of C’mons and studied them the way other people study film. What drew him wasn’t just the tennis. It was watching someone succeed in a space that was designed without them in mind. He has never had a lesson. When he first started playing he simply emulated what he had watched for years. Serena’s mechanics. Her mannerisms. The way she moves through a point. It is, he admits, a little strange.

By then tennis had become the constant in his life. Georgetown came and went. Brooklyn became home. Somewhere in the middle of that he started making the kind of tennis stories he couldn’t find anywhere else.

“For a long time I waited for someone else to make the kind of work I wanted to see. Eventually I realised that maybe I was the person who was supposed to make it.”

Racquet Theory exists because Evan sees tennis everywhere. In fashion, architecture, design, music, photography, health, luxury, status, identity and relationships. Once he started paying attention he realised the game wasn’t confined to the court. It was embedded in culture. He wanted to document all the places where those worlds overlap. In nine months, he built sixty stories and a readership of more than 5,000 people.

He couldn’t find a place for people who thought about tennis the way he did, so he built one.

He doesn’t think tennis has a reach problem. He thinks it has a relevance problem.

He sat in a meeting with the head of one of the Grand Slams and was told they only speak to platforms with a minimum of 100,000 followers. It confirmed something he’d been thinking for a while: too much of tennis was trying to manufacture culture instead of documenting the culture that already existed.

“Relevance is greater than reach.”

That way of seeing doesn’t switch off when he leaves the court. At least once a week he finds himself thinking about the Naomi Osaka and Jen Brady 2020 US Open semifinal. Six years later, he still thinks that match doesn’t get talked about enough.

This is how his mind works. He’s interested in what sits beneath the surface of the game. The stories people overlook. The moments that linger long after everyone else has moved on.

The court itself is something else entirely. The most constant thing in a decade of change. No matter where he is in the world, those lines, those dimensions, and that feeling never change.

Every meaningful decision he has made over the last year has led him back to tennis. He has stopped trying to explain why.

Instead, he talks about the court.

“There’s something comforting about knowing that while everything else evolves, the court is always waiting for you exactly as you left it.”

YOYO: SHANGHAI

In Rome, she looked up.

Above the clay courts of the Foro Italico, marble figures stand at their highest points, racquets raised, bodies frozen mid-swing. They have been there since the 1930s. They do not move. They do not tire. They do not double fault.

She had her camera. She pressed the shutter.

Yoyo is based in Shanghai, where she co-founded CEMENT, a creative agency working at the intersection of art, culture and contemporary life. In her spare time she is a multimedia artist. She has been doing it long enough to know what she is looking for before she arrives somewhere, and to recognise it when it appears.

Tennis found her early. Her parents introduced her to the game in 2002, watching the Shanghai Masters Cup together. Something stayed. The two worlds, art and tennis, have never been separate for her. In both she finds the same things. Creativity. The need to adapt. The moment when preparation runs out and you simply have to respond.

When she picks up a camera at a match she sets a theme first. In Rome it was the sculptures, the juxtaposition of the still and the moving, the perfect marble body and the imperfect human one below it, trying to become something close. In Shanghai it was the fans, the young kids, the energy in the stands. Her next theme will be emotions. She is still waiting for the right moment to reveal itself.

This is how she moves through the world. With a frame in mind. With a sense of what belongs inside the picture and what stays out.

In 2019 she was at Wimbledon as a reporter. Credentialled, seated at a desk, there to write about what happened.

What happened was Djokovic beat Federer in five sets. For a Federer fan, it was a particular kind of loss.

During the trophy ceremony, the sadness took over.

Then she sat back down at her desk.

“I had to put those personal emotions aside to properly write about Novak Djokovic. I felt like I had a bigger responsibility to convey the story and the overall atmosphere. While personal touches are necessary to make the writing engaging, there is absolutely no room for bias.”

She wrote the piece. She did her job. The feelings went somewhere else.

Behind a lens she can only focus closely on a single subject. Everything else falls away. She decides what enters the frame. She decides what stays outside it. This is the work. This is also, in some way, the protection.

On court as a player, none of that is available to her.

She is hyper-aware of her own actions, her partner’s movements, her opponent’s intentions. She can feel her own nerves. There is no viewfinder to look through. No choice about what to include and what to leave out.

The game sees everything.

Behind the camera, she chooses what enters the picture. On court, she doesn’t get that choice. The nerves enter. The doubt enters. The missed shot enters. Everything enters.

Because for someone who spends her life observing the world, tennis is one of the few places where she has no option but to be inside it.

The frame disappears.

Same paint, same lines, every time you arrive. The width hasn’t moved since the day it was marked out. The patch at the baseline is worn pale from however many feet have stood there before yours.

It doesn’t change for the cardio session at seven, or the lesson where you’re being corrected on the same fault for the third week, or the social hit where nobody’s keeping score and everybody is.

You arrive different every time. Tired, or restless, or carrying something from the morning that has nothing to do with tennis. Sharp some days, slow on others, distracted by a conversation you’re still finishing in your head. The court doesn’t notice any of this. It offers the same rectangle regardless.

There’s a kind of relief in that, once you stop expecting otherwise. The court isn’t going to meet you halfway. It isn’t going to be easier because you’re tired or harder because you’re good. It holds its shape and waits for you to bring yours.

Maybe this is what the empty court before anyone arrives is actually showing you. Not stillness. Not calm. Just the plain fact of the court, no different for what’s about to happen on it. The same four lines whether what follows is competitive or careless or somewhere in between.

You walk onto it as whatever you are that day. It doesn’t ask which version showed up.

Enough to meet it as you are.

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.