Third Saturday, third post.
It is frustrating and hard when I want to write these Saturday posts but don’t know where to begin or what to say. My training as an athlete is measurable and specific: step onto the court, get out the basket of balls and start working on serving, or strap on the running shoes and put up two miles before stepping onto the court again; or even watch this match, take notes, and try to apply what I’ve noticed next time I’m on the court. But writing these posts? It feels different, and often, impossible.
If I have not mapped out what I want to write, then on most days—these last three Saturdays—I am thinking about what words I want to get down, how I want to tell the story of the development of this league and the progress of my training: what to show, how much to show, how and what to tell…these are all questions without clear answers. Sure, decisions have to be made about training—when to train, what to work on, when to rest, how to schedule in running and workouts. This is true. But the writing process is different. The entire post has to be pulled from something that does not exist yet, which must be made by bringing an inner world onto these pages in order to help create an outer world.
A thought has to form, and that thought—through these pages—has to be expressed. Tennis is different: the thought is clear—hit this shot (or try to). There is no hesitation or doubt about how to tell the story of hitting a cross-court forehand, or why taking a lob out of the air for an overhead smash is better than letting it bounce first. Sure, thought processes and decisions like these can be narrated after the fact. One can go back and look at the tape and try to guess at a player’s thought process. Better yet, in a post-match interview, a player can paint their own picture looking back at a moment in time. But with writing, the body does not get to speak in the way it does during training or on the tennis court. With writing, there is that moment of bringing the inside to the outside, through invisible internal worlds that show up in the external.
And maybe there’s something soothing in that process—the fact that what gets broadcast to the outside world isn’t exactly the same as one thinks or believes on the inside. Yet, the other side of that coin is this: you have to work at expression through writing in a way that, in my estimation, is far more difficult than the way you work to win a point in a match. Writing becomes cerebral—a puzzle to solve, a sentence to craft—whereas winning the point is something to do, based on instinct, touch, training, and timing.
The point wins itself because the mind gets out of the way and the body goes to work. Yes, there are flow states that can be reached in writing—states where the words just appear, and the mind becomes more of a channel than the producer of its own ideas—but even then, the body is secondary, a quiet observer rather than the leading initiator and guide.
All of this is to say: as a co-founder of this league, I am so very excited, and eternally grateful, to be able to interview the players, coaches, and contributors who will all be working toward making the APTL a living, breathing, growing, and dynamic tennis ecosystem. The skills of writing and storytelling rely on different internal mechanisms, yes, but one central thread unites them: the desire to create, to make something out of nothing, and to generate a moment in time—a memory—where one did not exist before.
