While the Tennis Tactician is a themed cardio tennis company, the purpose of the fun is helping people suffering from mental illness. For me, it started in middle school. I had great parents, a happy life, and I considered myself to be “normal.” I had friends. I was dating. I was doing well in school. By the end of that year I was sitting with a pen and a notepad trying to find words for feelings were already beginning to destroy me. If my life were a book, almost every chapter would be about mental health.
Because of good fortune and access to care that I did nothing to deserve, I feel better today. But I still wake up at night screaming and sweating through the mattress in fear “it” returns.
The Shape of It
06″ />By high school the anxiety was constant. Generalized, maybe social — the labels don’t really matter when you’re inside the thing. I couldn’t think straight. I’d leave school in the middle of the day, walk home, and lie in my bed in the dark for hours. Not for an afternoon. Days and weeks were already blending together in a blanket of misery I wouldn’t throw off for over twenty more years.
I got diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I got diagnosed with OCD. I do not believe most days that those labels capture what is actually happening — I think the boxes exist for billing and for the convenience of the medical system, and I think the experience inside the box is its own private country no one else can visit. But the labels gave me access to medications, and the medications preserved, became, and ruined my life simultaneously.
I’ve been on every medication that exists. I have gained fifty pounds on one and lost fifty pounds on another. I’ve spent entire afternoons throwing up from one of them. Finding the right combination of psychiatric medication is not science — it’s trial and error, and the person doing the trying is so fucking impaired that they can’t tell whether the current combination is making them better or worse.
The depressive episodes have lasted months. Lying in bed. No will to do anything except curse myself for having no will. Ordering takeout. Never leaving the house. Rarely even showering. Not cleaning anything up. Waiting to die. In the manic episodes I have said and done unspeakably stupid things and they have cost me dearly. That is a different page. The Train
For a stretch of years I worked at a bar that sat next to a set of train tracks. Every shift, every day, I thought about standing on those tracks. I’d seen a horror movie once where someone got hit by a train and was pulverized — gone, instantly, no slow part. That’s what I wanted.
Two things kept me alive. My parents — I couldn’t bear to be the thing that hurt them. And my cats. Frosty, and another cat I loved very much who has since passed. I live in Florida. For whatever reason, I have no friends here. It’s mostly me and Frosty. And there was no version of me that could leave Frosty. That is a strange sentence to write. That a cat is the reason a person is still here. But it’s the truth. 2024
In 2024 I tried everything. I went in for twelve hospitalized rounds of electroconvulsive therapy. I strapped myself into a chair in a hospital and did IV ketamine infusions. I did thirty sessions of transcranial magnetic stimulation. I was hospitalized inpatient seventy-seven separate times that year — a few of them voluntary, a few of them not. I did all of that not knowing whether it was working, because I was too far gone to even tell whether I was getting better. And somehow, out of all of it, I came out the other side.
Why This Company Exists
My life had taught me clearly that dreams were future disappointments. But when permitted, I am a dreamer. I’ve always wanted to do something that mattered. But dreams don’t work when you can’t get out of bed, don’t have the energy to finish a class let alone build a company or when you spend most of your days actively wanting to off yourself. No apologies for being graphic because this shit is real and millions are feeling it right now.
The Tennis Tactician is the dream that emerged from the darkness. God gave me this moment and while I have it, I will fight. I am going for broke. Welcome to The Tennis Tactician and this company is about more than tennis. I believe I’ve started something special with a creative angle on cardio tennis and an amazing pro shop at the same time. The least I can do is donate 5% of all clinic and pro shop revenues — forever — to people standing where I was and could be again. I’ll count those dollars we donate. I’ll ask you to add some of your own. Donate directly on the Homepage.
If we can raise some substantial money together for mental health and suicide prevention, I will used my darkness to lighten the path of another. That’s what this themed cardio tennis company down in sunny Fort Lauderdale, Florida is all about. On Tennis and Mental Health
I also want to challenge the tennis industy. I’ll say this directly: tennis as a sport does not do enough for the people inside it who are struggling. The pro tour has started to talk about it more in the last few years, and that is genuine progress, but at every level below the top — junior tennis, college tennis, recreational play, coaching — players and coaches are largely on their own. There is no system. There is no scaffolding. There are mentors when you get lucky and silence when you don’t.
I would like to see that change. I would like the sport that saved me to be a sport that saves more people. The Tennis Tactician is one small company. Our 5% won’t prevent the unquantifiable suffering due to mental illness that surrounds us daily. Saving the world, unlikely. But helping the tennis industry make thoughtful, progressive changes to help players of all ages balance mental health with their tennis game? That sounds like a place to start.
