Frosty: The Official Mascot of the Tennis Tactician
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Frank Sinatra
- May 20, 2026
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- May 20, 2026
Alan Jackson
- May 22, 2026
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THE MISSION
The Tennis Tactician is a themed cardio tennis company. This page is about why it exists.
It started in sixth grade.
Nothing happened. That’s the part nobody believes, but it’s the truth — I wasn’t bullied, my parents weren’t fighting, no one died, nothing was wrong on the outside. Something just changed inside of me, biochemically, over the course of one school year, and I have been trying to describe it accurately ever since.
I was a happy kid in September of that year. 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 a feeling I had no vocabulary for, because the doctors kept asking me how I felt and the only thing I could come up with was “spacey.” That word didn’t get me anywhere. It still doesn’t. There aren’t good words for this, which is part of what makes it so hard to ask for help.
If my life were a book, almost every chapter would be about mental health.
I am writing this from a place of feeling better than I have in years. I am also writing it terrified — there isn’t a day that goes by that I’m not afraid I’ll wake up tomorrow and be back in it.
I’ll tell you what “it” is.
The Shape of It
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. For months at a stretch I’d have weeks where most days bled into the next one this way.
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 were the next eighteen years of my life.
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 impaired that they often can’t tell whether the current combination is making them better or worse. You are a ping-pong ball being batted around between dosages.
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. Every day was 24 hours of 60 minutes, and I watched every minute go past me, on the clock, without participating.
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. I do not have a lot of close people. It’s mostly me and them. 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
I have spent my whole adult life having dreams.
I am a dreamer. I have always had high standards for myself. I have always wanted to do something that mattered. And for almost two decades I have watched dream after dream after dream come up in me and then die quietly inside of me, because you cannot perform miracles when you can’t get out of bed. You cannot become anything if you don’t have the energy to finish a class. You cannot build a life if you spend most of your days actively wanting to leave it.
The dreams came and went, came and went, came and went. And I got older. And I started to believe it was all done — that the version of me who was going to do something with his life had been a child’s misunderstanding, and the real version was the one lying in the dark.
The Tennis Tactician is the first dream that has survived.
It survived because I am, at this exact moment in my life, more alive than I have been since sixth grade. I do not know how long that will last. I am terrified of how long that will last. But while I have it, I am pouring everything I have into this — every minute, every dollar, every other piece of my life I’ve had to set down. I have gone for broke.
I am building a themed cardio tennis company because tennis is one of the few things on this earth I love without complication. I understand it. I have been a player, a coach, a fan; I have walked into Flushing Meadows for the U.S. Open and into Hard Rock Stadium for the Miami Open and felt the cracks of the racquets and the focus on the courts and known, every single time, that this is one of the places I belong. I coached a high school team that won a state championship. That was one of the most fulfilling moments of my life.
But this company is more than tennis. This company has a mission.
The $1,000,000
The Tennis Tactician’s stated goal is to raise $1,000,000 for mental health and suicide prevention charities.
That number is not a marketing line. That number is what I want, more than I have ever wanted anything, before I die. I have been at every low you can be at. I have wanted to stand on those tracks. I know what it feels like to spend a year of your life waiting for it to be over. I do not want anyone else to feel that, ever, if I can help it.
If we hit a million dollars for mental health and suicide prevention, I will have done the thing I’ve been trying to do since sixth grade. I will have turned the worst part of my life into help for someone else. I do not know if that will make me happy — happiness as people describe it has always sounded like a fiction to me — but I think it will make my life make sense.
That’s enough.
On Tennis and Mental Health
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 contribution to that — every clinic, every post, every dollar we route to the charities that already do the real work. If we can be a part of changing what tennis offers the people who play it, I will count that as a second life’s work.
If You Have Read This Far
Thank you. This was hard to write. Most things about this are hard to write.
If you are in it right now — if you are reading this from a bed you can’t get out of, or a bar with train tracks next to it, or a hospital room — I want you to know that I have been where you are, and I am writing this from a place I did not believe I would ever reach. I am not telling you it gets better the way people tell you it gets better. I am telling you that I have stood where you are standing, and I am still here, and that is the only piece of evidence I have that there is anything on the other side.
Please don’t go. Not today.
If you need someone to talk to right now, dial or text 988 — the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You don’t have to be sure. You don’t have to know what to say. The people on the other end of that line have heard every version of what you are feeling and they will not flinch.
And if you happen to also love tennis — come find us. Bring whatever you have left. Show up sweaty. We will meet you on the court.
— Jackson