The business of tennis

I once got a fortune cookie that said

“Business is a lot like tennis — if you don’t serve well, you lose.”

My sister found an old tennis racket somewhere and brought it to tryouts at school. She got made fun of, came home crying, and the whole thing just never happened. Not because she didn't want it. Just because nobody wanted to spend whatever a tennis racket costs, and that was enough. There's a version of her that played tennis, maybe loved it, maybe was good at it. That version just didn't get to exist.

I think about that a lot when people talk about merit.

I was in IB and honors classes. From the outside, that probably looked like opportunity. From the inside, I was surviving. My grades slipped because my life was slipping, and while everyone around me seemed to be talking about college applications and SAT prep and where they were going to school, I was tuning it out completely. Not because I didn't care — because I genuinely believed they weren't talking to me. College was something that happened to other people. People whose families had already explained what FAFSA was, or even what community college was.. what any of it was.

I didn't find out until the fall of my senior year. By then, deadlines I didn't know existed had already passed. I never got to visit a college campus. The version of me that might have had more options had already been quietly foreclosed on — mostly by circumstance, a little by my own learned smallness about what was possible for me. Ironically, being a young mom was the only reason college became a reality for me. Because someone saw me and saw that my circumstances don’t reflect my internal world. It was luck that I found out about college.

People talk about college access like the barrier is motivation. Like if you wanted it badly enough, you'd figure it out. But wanting it doesn't give you a co-signer for a private loan. Wanting it doesn't give you the credit history you don't have at 18. Wanting it doesn't make you FAFSA-eligible if your documentation is complicated, or get you to campus if transportation is unreliable, or replace the laptop you don't own, or cover the unpaid internship that assumes you can afford to work for free.

The system isn't neutral. It's built on a baseline of stability that it never bothers to name, because the people who designed it already had it and wouldn’t even know it.

Federal loans require documentation, citizenship status, tax records. Private loans require credit or a co-signer — neither of which most 18-year-olds from unstable homes have. There's a version of FAFSA math where being abandoned as a child makes you an "independent student" and unlocks more aid, so you win that lottery I guess.

And underneath all of it is something harder to fix than the money: the information gap. Middle-class kids grow up with this stuff just in the air around them — FAFSA deadlines, the logic of extracurriculars, the difference between a university and a community college. It's assumed, ambient, passed down without anyone thinking of it as a resource. For a lot of us it simply isn't there. And you can't want something you don't know exists.

When someone who had stability says they worked hard for their degree, I believe them. I'm sure they did. But there's an entire invisible infrastructure behind that work — parents who knew the deadlines, a home stable enough to study in, a safety net that made risk feel survivable. That's not just personal effort. That's a set of conditions that got quietly renamed merit.

The kid who finishes college while documented as homeless didn't prove the system works. They survived it in spite of everything it failed to give them. Those are not the same thing, and collapsing them does something cruel — it makes the exception into the argument, and uses it to avoid looking at everyone else.

Something as small as the awareness of a possibility can change the entire trajectory of a life. A racket. A conversation someone thought to have. A deadline someone thought to mention. The absence of those things doesn't announce itself. It just slowly becomes the shape of what you thought was possible for yourself.

My son is in his fourth year of basketball. I remember the first time he picked up a ball — a friend invited us to the playground, and I just knew. I even recorded his first basket.

I played in early high school, with the boys, informally. I wasn’t bad. But after my sister and the tennis racket, it didn't even really cross my mind to pursue it through school. That door had already taught me something.

My son has never had to learn that lesson. Every season we've shown up fully — live NBA games, playoffs on the couch, 2K, pickup at the park, practices, games. I've volunteered in the sports industry to understand it better. I've signed him up for camps, reached out to anyone I know for advice on how to keep nurturing this, started asking around about the college pathway already. He's eleven. I'm weighing whether this is the right year for a travel team or whether we wait, because I want him to understand what commitment means before he steps into it. I want him to make that choice with his eyes open.

I want him to know what's within his reach before he makes decisions that shape the rest of his life. I want him to know early. I want the answer to be: everything.

As for my daughter — she’s let me know that she wants to play tennis.