Tennis forged my lifelong friendships! I traveled the world thanks to tennis! Tennis allowed me to learn invaluable lessons! I am who I am because of tennis!
To say that tennis has defined me would be a vast understatement. Tennis was a part of my life before I was even born; my mother hid her tennis racquet in her violin case, sneaking out of the house to play tennis. Later, she competed while pregnant with me and then divorced my father, not less because of tennis. First, custody was given to my dad. My grandparents raised me, and even with my mom ‘absent,’ tennis was to be part of my life, a different part, but essential and forming nonetheless. My grandparents talked plenty about tennis, just not favorably. I grew up in communism, and having a professional sports career was pretty much impossible, so my grandparents didn’t miss the chance to remind me of that fact at least once daily.
When I was 6, the courts granted my mom full custody, and I moved cities. Tennis was to be an even more significant part of my life now, yet I started to play tennis when I was about 12. Soccer was my first love and six years of grandparental convincing that tennis was a waste of time did it. However, I did spend almost every day in the club. My mom was acting as the women’s national team coach at the time, so I would spend most of my after-school hours at the facilities watching her and other coaches coach. Later in life, I realized that this must have been when I had “decided’ to become a coach.
My playing tennis career is nothing to brag about: a few tournament wins and a few national doubles titles, yet nothing indicating a run at the world top 100. Accordingly, I was planning to take in the footsteps of my dad and study law, and that resulted in me more or less abandoning competitive tennis in my high school senior year. My father’s professional climb to the post of deputy AG assured me of a promising professional career in the field for me as well, barring no major mistakes on my end. Then the Berlin wall happened! Everything I, and everyone else of my generation, knew about life was flipped upside down. In this new reality of uncertainty, my mom decided to jump on the first possibility of working aboard, and we moved to Austria.
We both started teaching tennis in a sports hotel in a village of 1500. My prior teaching experience was, well, nonexistent, yet I was earning about 15 dollars an hour. My father, the deputy AG, was bringing home the equivalent of about 100 dollars a month. Farewell to law school! Tennis coaching, here I come! The year was 1990, and I couldn’t have imagined the life journey tennis coaching would take me on- from the sometimes depressing reality of working seven days a week under the gloomy mountain skies of the Austrian village to warming up a player of mine on Arthur Ashe stadium for the US Open night session.
Tennis took me, literally, from the city of Ruse, where I was born, all the way to Houston, Texas, where I have been residing since 1997. Throughout my professional journey, I did help beginners learn the difference between a forehand and a backhand. I was also blessed to coach four professional women to victories into the 3rd rounds of Grand Slams in singles and a quarterfinal in doubles. However, the greatest joy in my professional life was the product of my work as a coach/mentor to junior tennis players in Houston.
I had the pleasure of seeing quite a few of my pupils grow through the sport of tennis. I was also fortunate enough to be in a position to help them capitalize on their passion and talent through subsidizing tennis lessons and junior academy scholarships. However, more than such assistance is needed to bridge the current generation’s significant gap with their European peers. The idea of TFEF was born out of discussions with former students, among whom Cassandra and Jose, about how to fill that void. I look forward to TFEF providing the necessary help. Given my life journey, I can help TFEF succeed.
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