Nobody Wants to be a Tennis Pro

"If you end up a tennis coach I have failed."

My dad reminded me regularly when I was growing up with aspirations of playing professional tennis.

I was never sure what Dad had against tennis coaches. Was it jealousy? Frustration that he could never master the sport causing him to settle for the technically easier game of squash?

Was it the constant requests for free medical advice, is that what got under dad, the doctor’s, skin? The endless barrage of “does this look infected?”

Was it the sole fact that they weren’t rich? That was definitely part of it, but couldn’t be all of it - Dad always insisted I do what I love, even if it meant driving a Honda Civic.

Whatever the reason, my dad and all the other parents at the academy all seemed to agree on one thing: They didn’t want their kids to end up teaching tennis.

The message was confusing: Listen to your coach or you'll end up like them!

So naturally we believed our coaches were failed ex-tennis players.

Players who had stalled out somewhere between promise and irrelevance, players who spoke about “the tour” in a way that suggested they had, at some point, been on it, even if no one could quite verify that.

Then there were the younger coaches—the ones only a few years older than us, who, after a long day in the sun, teaching summer camp, would give us the hard truth: Your parents are right, and so are mine. Coaching tennis is not a real gig. It’s torture. It’s just a way to pay the bills while you figure out what’s next.

I’ve been around enough clubs, met enough coaches to confirm that 99% of coaches, maybe 100% of former tennis player turned coaches, don’t wants to be on the tennis court all day feeding tennis balls.

Now before I get too deep, let me clarify. I’m not saying coaches don’t like coaching. In fact most love coaching, and sun, and fresh air and the soul fulfilling relationships we’re lucky to build with our players.

We love it so much that building your tennis games is like a low-grade Stockholm Syndrome. We understand that the bonds we form with our players mean more than any pay cheque ever could.

What I’m talking about is being on the tennis court feeding tennis balls.

It’s a job that drains you, physically and emotionally and unlike other physically demanding jobs (construction, plumbing, furniture moving), it carries the illusion of leisure and privilege—because after all, it’s tennis. Something the wealthy play in their free time.

The uniform might be country club-branded Nike polos, but make no mistake, being one of your club’s tennis pros is a blue-collar job.

It’s manual labor.

Hit, pick up, hit, pick up… thank God for those ball pick-up tubes. You exchange your time and finite energy for just enough cash to pay your bills and maybe a little left over for a trip to an all-inclusive in Mexico every other year.

The older you get, the more your body breaks down and relies on more powerful racquets. There’s no paid time off, no retirement plan, no medical insurance unless you’ve got a sympathetic spouse with benefits. The risk of repetitive stress injuries is high, and there’s no workers’ comp for a burnt-out rotator cuff.

Every day, as a tennis pro, you’re surrounded by extreme wealth—people who made their fortunes in finance, real estate, tech— industries that reward long-term strategic thinking—they people take tennis lessons while their money works for them.

These same people assume their tennis instructor is, in some vague way one of them—a peer, a fellow enthusiast, someone who, like them, wears sweat-wicking fabrics and discusses string tension with unnecessary seriousness.

While the lesson takers covet the tennis pros easy command of the sport and the almost mystical way we move to the ball before it even arrives, the tennis pro covets the lesson taker’s ability to be here for hours, tinkering with their serve, fully immersed in the game, while their investments and vacation properties and passive income allow them to avoid the business of survival.

So why does anyone become a tennis pro, then?

Like the summer camp coach said: It’s temporary.

The reason so many tennis pros end up in this strange financial purgatory, is that their entire childhoods were spent chasing a dream instead of a practical education.

While their classmates took AP Calculus, they were at USTA sectionals. While their friends were networking through internships, they were drilling inside-out forehands and visualizing winning the US Open.

By the time they realized they weren’t going pro, it was too late—they were tennis majors, fluent in strategy and biomechanics but clueless in a boardroom.

Now, with Tennis in their DNA, it lingers in the bloodstream, a permanent itch, a lifelong compulsion to tweak, tinker, and fine-tune not just their tennis game, but their lives, as well.

The relentless drive to be something more that comes with pursuing your tennis dreams, or any overly ambitious dreams at a young age — that kind of fire doesn’t burn out, it mutates, finds new fuel, takes different shapes.

Some ex-players, become tennis coaches and put their purpose into their students. Their purpose becomes proving that they are, in fact, professional material. A guru— their body couldn’t do it, but their mind can, and will, through you and your trophies.

They strive to develop an all-star, that will help them be recognized as a cultivator of greatness.

With that reputation, they can hire a stable of coaches, delegate the tough lessons, become a name rather than a labourer, and do what they have always dreamed of doing: not have to feed tennis balls.

Others see tennis as a networking tool. They spend their days giving lesson to a select wealthy and powerful group they believe can help them succeed, insisting that "Tennis isn’t my real job—I just do it to supplement my side hustle. Do you have a minute to hear about my app? It locates tennis players in your neighbourhood!”

They insist coaching tennis is just a temporary career recalibration. They look down at the very sport that defines them, hoping to distance themselves from the flaky sex-craved stereotypes, and parlay a private lesson into a business opportunity, an investment in their startup, or—at the very least—a foot in the door.

Some dream of becoming the tennis director, that semi-mythical figure who control the club culture, only teaches a few VIP students, strolls onto the court with a coffee, and spends more time crafting dry one-liners than actually feeding balls.

All roads lead to getting off the court, and with every buzzer indicating the next lesson, the urgency to escape increases.

As a tennis pro, you watch as players, and fellow coaches, come and go, knowing most are here only briefly, a passing lesson, a seasonal client, a fellow tennis pro with a side-hustle that actually raised capital.

Faces fade like old tournament draw sheets. You become a relic of yesterday’s game— a ghost of forehands past, lingering at the baseline.

It’s an endless search— not just for another student, another hour, but for that same purpose that got you into the game, and a game plan for how it’s going to get you out.

Most pros—at least the ones paying attention—have started to find purpose in a fresh new hope cycle that doesn’t involve getting your real estate license: content creation.

Sharing wisdom, tips, tricks all for free, and online; making themselves a brand rather than a service.

Content can land branding deals, a viral lesson tip on Instagram can lead to a paid partnership with a racquet company. A YouTube channel breaking down pro matches, monetized with ads. Merch! Got to have that Merch!

The Content Game provides a drug that tennis got them hooked on at a young age: The ability to track growth numerically. What used to be your tennis ranking is now your follower count, your views, your comments, your latest fix.

And so, one by one, tennis pros are setting up cameras and sharing tips. The pros who once lived hand to mouth, whose financial future depended on the seasonal whims of country club tennis programs, are now turning their expertise into scalable income.

Instead of explaining continental grip for the thousandth time, they’re selling courses on it. Instead of drilling with millionaires for $80 an hour, they’re getting paid by millionaires to sponsor their content.

Tennis pros are starting to believe that maybe, if they get enough followers, they’ll get to be the coach walking onto the court with a coffee and a smile, as their stable of coaches feed balls.

Or maybe they can get so successful that they can start taking tennis lessons instead of giving them. They can return to their sport and fix all the parts of their game that got them into this mess in the first place.

Maybe this is a new dream, maybe it will die out, maybe I am just talking about the human condition and we are all in jobs that have the end game of getting out of.

Whatever it is, I know I will return to my sun-bleached tennis court, to feed balls to a CEO who just got back from Francis Ford Coppola’s villa in Peru, and explain the concept of topspin to Rosemary in-between water breaks, while in my mind- equal parts Pinky and the Brain — I convince my dad that I’m not a tennis coach: I’m just feeding tennis balls while I think of a way to take over the world.