What it’s like to be a “tennis” family

If your family is some other “sports family”, you’ll find some common themes, probably.

This past weekend we watched King Richard — a touching movie about the tennis journey of the Williams sisters. The story centers around their father played by Will Smith — his rich character, determination, and unabating pursuit — against all odds — of a big dream.

Watching King Richard was a nearly mandatory activity for our family. I have 4 kids and all play tennis, except for my oldest son who switched to another sport — running. In fact, we brought to the movie a bunch of other kids. My wife used to play in Russia in her younger years. She now coaches our kids and has a small group of other tennis kids she teaches. They were a loud bunch in an otherwise empty cinema theater! Lots of girls, as it is my ten-year-old daughter who’s the “main” tennis player, at least for now, so all her tennis buddies came along.

What makes a family a “some-sport family” (tennis, soccer, ice hockey, etc)?

There isn’t of course a clear definition but, broadly, you build your life around your kid’s sport. That includes doing at least some of this:

• Choosing to live in a place — and moving to such a place if necessary — that has good conditions (weather, facilities, coaches, tournaments, competition) for the sport being pursued
• Making special schooling arrangements because training and competing require scheduling flexibility that public schools don’t allow. Of course, some sports are “high-school sports”, meaning that there is a direct path from being on your high school’s team to college. But it’s not the case with tennis
• Major travel for tournaments and competitions — so overnight stays, long drives, or flying
• Obviously — spending a lot of money. Equipment, coaches, travel, special schooling arrangements, special camps, treating injuries
• Adjusting intra-familial relationships. Often one of the parents drives the pursuit of a sport and is responsible for the intensity that comes with it, while the other one adjusts… or doesn’t adjust, in which case parents sometimes break up (and I’m not exaggerating! I know examples)
• While it’s impossible, if not silly, to hope for or plan a professional career, one definitely hopes that playing a sport competitively will help with college
• There is an overarching commitment to supporting your kid’s sporting journey. It’s not easy to describe this commitment in its entirety — no list will truly cover all aspects of it.

Why do you become a sports family?

There is no archetypal sports family background. It’s common, I find, that one of the parents pursued some activity at a serious level in his or her younger years, but it’s not a must, and the past activity of the parent may have nothing to do with the kid’s. I know one mother who did ballet as a child, and now her kids do tennis and swimming.

Why it is hard, things you do, sacrifices you make

The chances of your kid becoming a pro athlete are extremely low. The expense of it, the risk of injuries or burn-out, the likelihood of not persevering to the extreme degree required to make it to stardom — these challenges are too much. So you spend years and years building your life around your child’s sport (or your childrens’ sports — which of course multiples the complexities!) without any guarantee of something meaningful coming out of it. In fact, if you’re too intense, it’s possible that your child will not only burn out and give up, but hate the sport. So you doubt your life, and your parenting choices. King Richards shows how the father was very focused on his daughters’ tennis not being pursued at the expense of education. In practice, you still make trade-offs and sacrifices. For example, two of my kids are homeschooled because of their tennis. I work from home but don’t have the discipline to be on top of their daily schooling. So I feel permanently guilty of not doing enough for them on the schooling front.

Sometimes you feel you’re robbing your children of their childhood. One of my teenage sons was recently going through a difficult stretch. He’d been injured for a while, fell behind in tennis, and stopped enjoying it (and he was enjoying it a lot before that). The special schooling arrangements we had for him no longer made sense but we kept them in place. “I just want to be normal, like other kids; I want to live a normal life”, he told me. It was really hard to hear those words. You start asking yourself if you’re being selfish and chasing your own questionable ambitions at the expense of your child’s happiness. But it’s not that straightforward. What does being normal mean? Playing video games and being on your smartphone all the time? Is being like everyone else good? When you’re going through those moments you start debating with your spouse and arguing. The arguments can get really bad. My wife was determined to persevere. She thought I was the one robbing our son of a unique opportunity to pursue something meaningful, to develop a lifetime hobby, to have a chance, in a few years of playing college tennis. “You don’t understand how good he can be, how good he already is, how much he will enjoy at college”, she told me. Well, yes, maybe, I thought, but his damn shoulder has been hurting for a year and a half now, we’ve done all we can to treat it and he’s still in pain, at what point do we draw the line?

Some months have gone by and my son now is back playing tennis. He seems very happy. I guess my wife was right! My intentions were good too but I was ready to give up. But it’s still a long journey ahead. This is just one example. There were numerous other situations when my wife and I disagreed over our parenting styles. In my family I’m usually the good cop, preferring to avoid tension and comfort my kids during their rough stretches. My wife can be very intense and merciless! But, truly, I don’t consider myself to be more right. I can be lazy and undisciplined, and my nice-ness doesn’t yield results.

You do some crazy shit when you’re truly committed to your kid’s sport. You move cities, states, sometimes countries!

A few years ago we left Northern California to live in… Memphis. My wife had an opportunity to intern under a great tennis coach — now our mentor of many years — who at the time was working in Memphis. So we packed our things, took our pets, and moved to Memphis. We then lived in Dallas, again because of tennis. We’ve been in Southern California for the last two years and are now moving to Florida. Why? Kids’ tennis! We’re pretty used to moving but it gets more and more difficult with every year. For example, for the first time in decades, we’ll have to live in separation to some degree as we want our oldest son to finish high school in California without any disruptions, so I’ll have to make arrangements to find a small place and live with him for the next year. And this oldest son is a passionate runner (like father like son thing…). He wants to run for college. He’s begging — as if our lives were not already complicated enough — to make arrangements for him during the winter or summer break to train at high altitude! Wyoming, or Colorado, or Wisconsin, or Utah, or Arizona to add to our journey of exploring America because of our kids’ sporting activities.

And the financial burden of being a tennis family — I don’t even want to go into the details, so painful and trivial it is. Put it this way, we’re far away from buying or owning a house and I’m not in my 20s.

Not that I care about other people’s opinions, but when you’re a sports family, you’re a freak to many people — with your coast-to-coast moves, with your intensity and commitment. My own mom — she visits from Russia twice a year — doesn’t understand our choices and the everyday intensity of our kids’ sporting journeys. She’s outright critical. It’d help if she actually moved to help us but she’d never do it.

I do have to finish on a positive note though. I’m very happy overall with our journey as a sports family. For one thing, even though I was never an athlete myself, I love sports, have huge respect for athletes, and living an active and healthy life is part of my identity (oh, here I can’t help bragging about my recent sub-3-hour marathon!). I don’t play tennis myself but I think there is a very special, unique, bond that links us together — all the travels, the ups and downs, the wins and losses, the difference on what athletes or teams we cheer on, the dreams we are persevering with. It’s intense but fun!

Do I hope to see my daughter play at Wimbledon one day? Absolutely! I want to cry tears of happiness already imagining that possibility. But even if we don’t get to the top of the mountain, it’s still a great journey.

Here is my daughter Taisiya with the US Open Finalist Leylah Fernandez

If you’d like to have unlimited access to my stories and all other writers on Medium, you can subscribe with this link (a share of the subscription fee will go to me to support my writing).