Issue 02: Late to the Ball, Right on Time

What Tennis Teaches Us

I picked up tennis in my thirties, after more than a decade building a career in Washington, DC, and, later, building a family. It was the first thing I did purely for myself. My career still needed me. My daughters needed me more. But on the court, none of that followed me in — it was just me and the ball, and in the middle of a rally I felt fully present in a way I rarely did anywhere else.

What surprised me about starting something new as an adult wasn't just how much there was to learn. It was how satisfying it felt to still have an arc of improvement ahead of me.

An Idea Worth Borrowing

The writer Gerald Marzorati was close to sixty when he decided to find out how good he could get at tennis — lessons, drills, tournaments, a whole book's worth of attention paid to the pursuit.

In Late to the Ball, he writes about the discipline of learning something new at that age, and what became the real point of it: not arriving somewhere, but continuing to want to get better while working around real limits. His limit was an aging body. Ours might be time, or the lack of it — work, a family, weekends that are rarely fully our own.

As he put it when talking about the book: “The arc of improvement is a storyline you have lots of control over. Other story lines not so much. Improving feels great, even if there is little greatness in the end.”

What Caught My Eye

Ben Shelton is having a breakout year — including his first Grand Slam final and a career-high ranking of No. 4, as of this month. He's also unusual among players at that level. Shelton began playing tennis around ten but didn't commit seriously to the sport until later, after spending much of his childhood playing other sports.

Prodigy stories make the headlines. What I keep coming back to, as a tennis parent, is a different question — not how do you raise a pro, but how do you raise someone built for a marathon instead of a sprint, in sport or in anything else.

See you next Monday.
— Simona

P.S. If this one resonates, we made something for the late bloomers — on court and otherwise. Late Bloomer →