At 51, I have dreams to play ITF senior tennis tournaments.

It’s nice to have new dreams. But it ain’t gonna be easy.

Time isn’t on my side.

I’ve been training five days a week the last couple months (while on COVID-19 lockdown, I’m not employed) preparing myself to play ITF senior tournaments all over the world, and maybe someday, win a few in the process. I’m currently a 4.0 USTA level tennis player, which means I’m good enough to play competitive tennis with beginning advanced players, but not yet quite skilled enough to compete with college level players. While I’ve played casually and recreationally since I was a teenager, I only started seriously playing in my late 40’s, competing in USTA tournaments only three years ago. I just turned 51 last March.

Audacious dreams, I know. I’ll be facing former college and ATP players in ITF, so I need to quantum leap improve my tennis in so many aspects — including changing bad technical habits ingrained from self-taught and YouTube coached recreational tennis.

For me, tennis is more than an athletic endeavor that’s keeping me young and alive. Training for ITF tennis is massively improving my life skills which paves the way for me to also accomplish my life dreams. As tennis goes, I go.

In the first half of my life, I was a mess. A scrapper and a relentless fighter, I invented and patchworked my own path. Often, holding a shitty hand necessitated a lot of bluffing. Driven by an inner-child need to be loved, I over-thought everything, tried too hard, over-obsessed about chasing greatness, burned bridges with my impatience, beat myself up for not doing enough. An unmitigated mess.

I want to approach the game properly, the way a promising junior might — but I don’t have the luxury of spending five years like junior players would…

In 2016, I hit a dead end. I couldn’t bluff my way through anymore. I struggled with deep depression, often contemplating suicide. A Paris sabbatical, a treatment called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), a mini-stroke in 2017, a Myers-Briggs personality test, and a butterfly in Costa Rica manifested my reboot on life. So after a four year hiatus, I’m going for my life dreams again. At 51. A late-blooming late-bloomer.

Of all the dreams I’m chasing, it’s the tennis one that I’m obsessed with. I want to see how far I can take my game. I want to approach my training properly, the way a promising junior player might — but unlike them, I don’t have the luxury of having five years to solidify my fundamentals. I hate to get dark here, but in five years, I could be dead. Feel me, dawg? But I’m actually more athletic now than when I was in my late-twenties, and I know I’m only playing at 45% of my potential.

I don’t want to leave that on the table. One time in my life, just one damn time, I just want to feel what it’s like to reach 100% of my potential. So, fuck it, I’m going for a HUNDRED PERCENT.

I’m in a rare subset of tennis players — the old athlete who didn’t play as a junior or in college who wants to play with the big boys.

I’m dying to see what I’m made of. As such, I haven’t found substantive resources devoted to guys like me with crazy ass dreams. I had coaches who were merely giving me standard-issue Saturday lessons but offered no long-term developmental program. They weren’t keenly interested in some old dude when they had lucrative junior hopefuls. They relegated me to the intermediate-group-lessons playing tennis for fun! demographic, forcing me to supplement the nominal coaching with the cacophony of YouTube and Instagram videos, podcasts and on-line coaching. As far as I knew, and I’ve been searching far and wide, but an entire program for guys like me wanting to play international tourneys simply doesn’t exist. Like my initial life path I mentioned earlier, I had to piece together my own developmental tennis program. Because a lot of it was by conjecture, my progress was haphazard and left me smash my racket frustrated that I wasn’t harnessing my tennis potential.

I’m finally making it a priority to assemble the right team to help me achieve my audacious tennis goals.

At the outset of 2020, a thought came to me: if I’m pursuing to be the best tennis player I can be, why am I relying on coaches who don’t care about my progress? And watching g-damn YouTube videos? Every pro player — hell, every junior with Grand Slam dreams — assembles an entire team to help them realize their full potential: the coach, the physio, the performance coach, the nutritionist, the fitness trainer, and letting in only the right people to surround them with love and support. I mean, I want to reach my full potential. Shouldn’t I make it a priority to find the right people? Even if I’m eligible for my AARP card?

To have a fighting chance to win ITF tournaments demands my mental game to be world-class. I’m a head case.

My whole f’ing life, I was always conditioned to accepting the cards I was dealt with. I wantonly drank the kool-aid called meritocracy. Meritocracy is unequivocally bullshit. To accomplish big hairy audacious dreams you need to get the right people — an entourage — that makes your dreams a reality.

Last November, I found a new coach, Aleksey Zharinov, a former NCAA and pro player who runs a program called The Russian System. His system reminds me of the old Soviet gymnastics system that produced perennial Olympic champions. Aleksey takes me and my dreams seriously. But he costs $100 a session. To keep up with the juniors whose parents are spending $50,000 a year at tennis academies, I’d need to pay shell out at least $25,000 to get to a high level. I simply can’t afford that. It’s a little depressing to think that it’s a lack of money that will prevent me from reaching my potential. Where is the God in that?

After having several casual hitting partners over the past three years, this past January, I found Armen, the pitch perfect practice partner for me. We met through a tennis website called Play Your Court. Armen is half my age, but he has the same crazy dreams as me and is just as obsessed as I am to practice everyday doing all the repetitive and monotonous yet vital tennis drills and fitness workouts that a serious player must do.

As a substitute to having a regular everyday coach, I’ve been watching a lot of tennis instructional videos from Top Tennis Training. I think they’re the best out there. The technical advice is solid and simple and completely makes sense. There is so much noise out there about how to play tennis, and so much of it is just snake oil. I bought a drills package from them that Armen and I utilize all the time.

In February, through Instagram, I sought out Duglas Cordero, the fitness coach for Dominic Thiem, the #3 ranked player on the ATP Tour. He tailored a weekly fitness program for me with drills and exercises that Thiem also incorporates in his fitness training. He almost beat Novak Djokovic in the recent Australian Open, so there you go.

I found a performance coach named Jeff Greenwald from Fearless Tennis to help me with my mental approach. To have a fighting chance to win ITF tournaments demands my mental game to be world-class. As I’ve described earlier, I’m a head case, resulting in repeating a lot of not so good decisions during match play and causing my mindset and focus to oscillate wildly. My brain hinders me like an anvil tied to my tennis racket. I’ve read Jeff’s book “The Best Tennis of Your Life” and I’m currently taking his joint course with Djokovic’s strategy coach Craig O’Shannessy called Getting Tight that is totally re-framing how I see and play the game.

It’s empowering to be on a path where I feel assured — from bona-fide elite level tennis experts — that I’m doing the right things, taking the proper steps. I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to be heard and my dreams supported. Up to this point, tennis — and other aspects of my life — was a guessing game, like a lottery.

I’m not letting Covid-19 get in my way.

For a test-drive, I planned to play my first ITF match in July, in a clay tournament in Bordeaux, France. The tourney was cancelled, however, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m bummed, but, bright side — it’s giving me the vital time to refine my fundamentals for a few months while the rest of the world is on pause. The stay home order and the mandate to lock up the tennis courts isn’t stopping Armen and me, either. We’re managing to find a way to have full-on hitting practices and fitness sessions.

Tennis is reparenting therapy.

Playing the sport teaches me life lessons I failed to learn when I was younger. Stuff like, focusing on process over outcome; giving myself permission to miss; letting go of past errors and staying in the present; watching the ball and keeping my eye on it. In both tennis and life, I often didn’t watch the ball come off the racket. I’d pull my head too soon, looking to its intended destination instead of hitting though and finishing the shot, with all my potential.

Tennis also teaches me patience and how to believe in myself in the face of adversity, which is hard for me.

Mostly, tennis teaches me humility. When I think “I got this,” or take a shot or my opponent for granted, I pay every time. Every. Point. Counts.

This time last year, I was oh, so close to suiciding. I still have moments of depression, but tennis lifts me up and breathes life into me. I’ve got a ton of work to do; so many mental and physical habits to break and I’m acutely feeling my body’s a bit on borrowed time, but to have renewed dreams at this juncture in my life and even better, a genuine means to achieve them, is making life exciting again. Finally.

Thanks for reading. Follow “Approach Shots” for more stories about chasing my tennis dream. I love reading responses and I’ll respond back for sure. You can also follow me on Instagram.