The number of hours we waste away staring into nothingness hoping that maybe something brilliantly amazing will happen to us seems to go on forever. I wonder what happens to people who have everything they want…do they spend their entire life staring into space? I sit here writing these words on these pages that you are reading. Turkish music from the roots of my heritage playing into my ears, a word of which I barely understand, I ask myself, what is something interesting that’s happened in my life? It seems every paper I’ve written is about tennis, but I realized, that is the only thing interesting that’s happened in my life. Maybe because it is my life, my past, present, and future.

I was born into the age of technology, the 20^th century, in the year of the monkey, 1992. Raised in the (201), the exact place we are now, Jersey City, New Jersey. It seems pretty bland to me, like potatoes without salt, perhaps because I’ve lived here all my life. Maybe this summer when I’ve moved three thousand miles from here I’ll look at this place differently. As I look around the tornado of my room, it seems everything reminds me of this sport, the U.S. open ticket on my nightstand, the bottle of spring water I drank while I was conditioning last night, my ginormous racquet bag, and the dreaded A.P. Physics text book that has a tennis ball shellacked right onto the cover.

Maybe I’m a wee bit obsessed, but what’s the point of doing something you love if you’re not passionate about it? It’s like being a workaholic, they only overwork themselves because they love what they do, and then there are those who work at McDonalds and Shop Rite who dread getting up to go to work everyday. And if I wasn’t obsessed with tennis there would be no point in me training to play professionally, now would there?

Did you know the average person thinks at four hundred words per minute? I think its eight hundred for me. There I go again…rambling.

I remember the day exactly. I was eight years old…so it was 2002. I was an ignorant little child who never wanted to try anything new and other than golf, tennis was the ultimate bore-fest. Hitting a ball back and forth…sounds fun. Sitting in our newly built house I was flipping through the TV channels bored out of my mind and came to halt when I heard Maria Sharapova’s piercing scream on the grass courts of Wimbledon. Mesmerized by the speed of the ball, I taught myself the scoring system. Once the match play for that day was over I forced my brother and sister to take me to the tennis courts which were a two-minute walk away. Using my hand-me-down racquet, it was my eldest sisters; I tried to hit the tennis ball back to my brother. My scrawny nine-year-old arms and non-athletic build struggled to swing the heavy tennis racquet, but there was something about the sport that made me want to keep trying. I remember looking down at the red asphalt beneath my sneakers, ready to give up, but I kept going at it. It was as if there was some sort of magnetism that kept me from leaving. Three o’clock, we headed home leaving the deserted courts behind, it seems they were always this way during any grand slam, especially Wimbledon. I supposed all of the tennis players were glued to their television sets watching the Tennis Channel or ESPN.

For the next month, I seized whatever chance I got to practice, but after school began, tennis just became an activity I took part in during the summer so I wouldn’t be bored. Two years passed before I returned to the sport, two years more knowledgeable, two years older. By now any skills that I had acquired from when I first started playing were down the drain and forget muscle memory. My muscles had as much memory of tennis as an eighty-five year old senile woman has of what she did yesterday.

Looking for a new hobby I took up tennis again and this time I stuck with it. With my siblings in college and working, my only practice partner was a good friend from school who would later on move away after our eighth grade graduation. Eventually two of my classmates asked me to teach them how to play the sport and from then on every Friday after school we would carpool to go to the tennis courts. Constantly reading on how to improve myself and watching tennis related videos for hours, I was motivated to get better. I wish I could calculate the number of hours I spent educating myself on this five-hundred year old sport…well, it developed into lawn tennis by the 19^th century.

Never did I think my ignorant mentality would lead me to become such a big tennis aficionado. Before I knew it, I was at the freshman orientation of the exact high school I wanted to go to since I was five (because my brother and sister went there), McNair Academic High School. Immediately after the speeches were over I went straight to the captain and co-captain of the girls’ tennis team to sign up. Canceling my vacation to California so I wouldn’t miss the practices and to do my summer homework I attended nearly every practice and landed a spot on varsity as part of the second doubles team.

That upcoming summer my parents had thoughts of moving to California. Tired of the same old things everyday, I was ready for change. Spending my free time helping my parents looking for jobs and houses on the west coast I realized that the weather would be perfect for tennis everyday. With that being said, I began to think, is tennis really what I want to spend the rest of my life thinking about, practicing for, and occupying my time with and the answer was yes. It is what I want to spend the rest of my life doing, or at least as long as my life and body will let me.

With this in mind, I decided to e-mail a coach near the town we would be moving to that summer and ask if there was any way he would be willing to lower his rate of eighty-five dollars an hour for private coaching. Within the same day, he responded asking about my level of play and within two more e-mails agreed to coach me for free. Reading his response sent my heart racing, my jaw dropping, and my eyes wide open as I let out a little scream.

Feeling the atmosphere at the U.S. Open and Wimbledon was like no other. They were the complete opposite but equally amazing. To be able to stand on a court surrounded by thousands of people yet the only thing you really see is that bright yellow-green ball coming at you at eighty miles and hour and your opponent on the other side of the net is one of the things that makes the sport so incredible. If I could feel that every time I went out onto a tennis court to do my job, then I would be living my dream.

Using this as motivation I practiced harder than usual trying to do everything to shape up my tennis skills to impress the coach for when I met him for the first time. When the day came, it was a Wednesday, my stomach was full of butterflies and the weather was unusually cold for California. After leaving the club I was beyond glad that all I had to do the next day was sit on a plane for five hours and just watch movies and eat. I thought perchance I was masochistic in a sense because although I was sorer in the one hour twenty minute assessment he gave me than after playing for four hours straight, I was happy about it. Perhaps it was merely knowing that I was improving that allowed me to keep a smile on my face. I wondered how much more and faster I would improve from having a professional coach than just teaching myself. It was simply amazing, but what really made my day…more like my life was hearing these words come out of my coach’s mouth:

“If she practices hard enough for the next few years she can make it.”

To my dismay, my family was not able to move to the west coast that summer. Annoyed at the fact that I would be missing out on a years worth of lessons I had no choice but to work on what my coach taught me and inform him on my progress through e-mail. As a sophomore I played second singles for the varsity team and tied for first place for the position of second singles in the city tournament after playing for nearly four hours straight. I would never regret those four hours. I don’t care how tired I was, it gave me a sense of accomplishment and confidence and more importantly it helped me form a closer bond with my teammates. It finally hit me though after the short speech our co-captain made about me at the end of our tennis dinner…I wouldn’t be playing with these girls next year and I’m leaving behind my hometown forever.

Completely devoted to my dream of playing professionally I changed my lifestyle. I figured if I really wanted this I’d better start conditioning at least one hour everyday, I wish it was more, but with the workload I have it is utterly impossible. Of course an athlete has to eat right as well, yes, that means no more junk food, except of course my limitation of a once-a-week indulgence. Even if it means chocolate only once a week, I’ll be willing to give it up to make this happen.

Maybe I stared into nothingness long enough and my something amazing has finally appeared.

The number of hours we waste away staring into nothingness hoping that maybe something brilliantly amazing will happen to us seems to go on forever. I wonder what happens to people who have everything they want…do they spend their entire life staring into space? I sit here writing these words on these pages that you are reading. Turkish music from the roots of my heritage playing into my ears, a word of which I barely understand, I ask myself, what is something interesting that’s happened in my life? It seems every paper I’ve written is about tennis, but I realized, that is the only thing interesting that’s happened in my life. Maybe because it is my life, my past, present, and future.

I was born into the age of technology, the 20^th century, in the year of the monkey, 1992. Raised in the (201), the exact place we are now, Jersey City, New Jersey. It seems pretty bland to me, like potatoes without salt, perhaps because I’ve lived here all my life. Maybe this summer when I’ve moved three thousand miles from here I’ll look at this place differently. As I look around the tornado of my room, it seems everything reminds me of this sport, the U.S. open ticket on my nightstand, the bottle of spring water I drank while I was conditioning last night, my ginormous racquet bag, and the dreaded A.P. Physics text book that has a tennis ball shellacked right onto the cover.

Maybe I’m a wee bit obsessed, but what’s the point of doing something you love if you’re not passionate about it? It’s like being a workaholic, they only overwork themselves because they love what they do, and then there are those who work at McDonalds and Shop Rite who dread getting up to go to work everyday. And if I wasn’t obsessed with tennis there would be no point in me training to play professionally, now would there?

Did you know the average person thinks at four hundred words per minute? I think its eight hundred for me. There I go again…rambling.

I remember the day exactly. I was eight years old…so it was 2002. I was an ignorant little child who never wanted to try anything new and other than golf, tennis was the ultimate bore-fest. Hitting a ball back and forth…sounds fun. Sitting in our newly built house I was flipping through the TV channels bored out of my mind and came to halt when I heard Maria Sharapova’s piercing scream on the grass courts of Wimbledon. Mesmerized by the speed of the ball, I taught myself the scoring system. Once the match play for that day was over I forced my brother and sister to take me to the tennis courts which were a two-minute walk away. Using my hand-me-down racquet, it was my eldest sisters; I tried to hit the tennis ball back to my brother. My scrawny nine-year-old arms and non-athletic build struggled to swing the heavy tennis racquet, but there was something about the sport that made me want to keep trying. I remember looking down at the red asphalt beneath my sneakers, ready to give up, but I kept going at it. It was as if there was some sort of magnetism that kept me from leaving. Three o’clock, we headed home leaving the deserted courts behind, it seems they were always this way during any grand slam, especially Wimbledon. I supposed all of the tennis players were glued to their television sets watching the Tennis Channel or ESPN.

For the next month, I seized whatever chance I got to practice, but after school began, tennis just became an activity I took part in during the summer so I wouldn’t be bored. Two years passed before I returned to the sport, two years more knowledgeable, two years older. By now any skills that I had acquired from when I first started playing were down the drain and forget muscle memory. My muscles had as much memory of tennis as an eighty-five year old senile woman has of what she did yesterday.

Looking for a new hobby I took up tennis again and this time I stuck with it. With my siblings in college and working, my only practice partner was a good friend from school who would later on move away after our eighth grade graduation. Eventually two of my classmates asked me to teach them how to play the sport and from then on every Friday after school we would carpool to go to the tennis courts. Constantly reading on how to improve myself and watching tennis related videos for hours, I was motivated to get better. I wish I could calculate the number of hours I spent educating myself on this five-hundred year old sport…well, it developed into lawn tennis by the 19^th century.

Never did I think my ignorant mentality would lead me to become such a big tennis aficionado. Before I knew it, I was at the freshman orientation of the exact high school I wanted to go to since I was five (because my brother and sister went there), McNair Academic High School. Immediately after the speeches were over I went straight to the captain and co-captain of the girls’ tennis team to sign up. Canceling my vacation to California so I wouldn’t miss the practices and to do my summer homework I attended nearly every practice and landed a spot on varsity as part of the second doubles team.

That upcoming summer my parents had thoughts of moving to California. Tired of the same old things everyday, I was ready for change. Spending my free time helping my parents looking for jobs and houses on the west coast I realized that the weather would be perfect for tennis everyday. With that being said, I began to think, is tennis really what I want to spend the rest of my life thinking about, practicing for, and occupying my time with and the answer was yes. It is what I want to spend the rest of my life doing, or at least as long as my life and body will let me.

With this in mind, I decided to e-mail a coach near the town we would be moving to that summer and ask if there was any way he would be willing to lower his rate of eighty-five dollars an hour for private coaching. Within the same day, he responded asking about my level of play and within two more e-mails agreed to coach me for free. Reading his response sent my heart racing, my jaw dropping, and my eyes wide open as I let out a little scream.

Feeling the atmosphere at the U.S. Open and Wimbledon was like no other. They were the complete opposite but equally amazing. To be able to stand on a court surrounded by thousands of people yet the only thing you really see is that bright yellow-green ball coming at you at eighty miles and hour and your opponent on the other side of the net is one of the things that makes the sport so incredible. If I could feel that every time I went out onto a tennis court to do my job, then I would be living my dream.

Using this as motivation I practiced harder than usual trying to do everything to shape up my tennis skills to impress the coach for when I met him for the first time. When the day came, it was a Wednesday, my stomach was full of butterflies and the weather was unusually cold for California. After leaving the club I was beyond glad that all I had to do the next day was sit on a plane for five hours and just watch movies and eat. I thought perchance I was masochistic in a sense because although I was sorer in the one hour twenty minute assessment he gave me than after playing for four hours straight, I was happy about it. Perhaps it was merely knowing that I was improving that allowed me to keep a smile on my face. I wondered how much more and faster I would improve from having a professional coach than just teaching myself. It was simply amazing, but what really made my day…more like my life was hearing these words come out of my coach’s mouth:

“If she practices hard enough for the next few years she can make it.”

To my dismay, my family was not able to move to the west coast that summer. Annoyed at the fact that I would be missing out on a years worth of lessons I had no choice but to work on what my coach taught me and inform him on my progress through e-mail. As a sophomore I played second singles for the varsity team and tied for first place for the position of second singles in the city tournament after playing for nearly four hours straight. I would never regret those four hours. I don’t care how tired I was, it gave me a sense of accomplishment and confidence and more importantly it helped me form a closer bond with my teammates. It finally hit me though after the short speech our co-captain made about me at the end of our tennis dinner…I wouldn’t be playing with these girls next year and I’m leaving behind my hometown forever.

Completely devoted to my dream of playing professionally I changed my lifestyle. I figured if I really wanted this I’d better start conditioning at least one hour everyday, I wish it was more, but with the workload I have it is utterly impossible. Of course an athlete has to eat right as well, yes, that means no more junk food, except of course my limitation of a once-a-week indulgence. Even if it means chocolate only once a week, I’ll be willing to give it up to make this happen.

Maybe I stared into nothingness long enough and my something amazing has finally appeared.