Hitting a tennis ball for the first time in 20 years

Between the ages of 18 and 21, the last years I spent in Singapore, my best friend from high school, KC, and I were both obsessed with the game Virtua Tennis 3 in the video arcade, and we had both gotten extremely good. The machines were usually set up back to back, and you would put in a dollar and play against the computer until someone put in their own dollar on the other side and challenged you. The winner would stay on, and there were days when the arcade was busy and we’d sit there for hours on a single credit, and the top right of the screen would read “50 straight wins” or something crazy (I think I almost broke 100 once).

You could buy these credit-card sized things that allowed you to store your stats all the way up to 1,000 games before you’d have to buy another to roll them over. If I remember correctly, the “main” card I used had about 1,100 wins and 100 losses (many of those from when I was first learning the game) by the time the arcade machines were retired, and the arcades themselves pivoted to what I call the “kid’s casino” - games of chance that rewarded players with prizes or tickets, but where the odds were ultimately set by the establishment. Alas, the world burns in search of greater margins.

About a year into our virtual tennis journey, KC and I decided to learn to play actual tennis together. We took some lessons, watched videos on nascent YouTube, and mostly hit with each other for about 8-10 hours a week, sometimes more. Although we had both gotten into the sport relatively late in life, we approached it with the same hunger to play and learn as we did its virtual counterpart. Over the course of those three years, I must have hit hundreds of thousands of balls.

But life came calling, and if you read my bio, tennis never made an appearance. I moved to the US, went to college, did a PhD, got a job, moved to San Francisco. In the intervening years, all my energy went toward building a career. I no longer had any athletic hobbies other than dragging myself to the gym a couple of times a week to jog on the treadmill.

In 2019, I was walking up the stairs to work, and found myself panting. I spent the next 6 years becoming a reasonably accomplished runner and have run a few marathons and ultramarathons.

After those three years in Singapore, I had never hit a tennis ball again.

Then, last Saturday (June 13, 2026), a friend from run club who had just picked up tennis herself tried to convince me to play tennis again. She didn’t have to try very hard - I didn’t have anything against the idea, it just never came to mind for the past two decades.

In some ways, this was a window into the strange way my brain works. In January, I signed up for padel classes because I wanted to play a racket sport again, but one that (I felt) was lower commitment and less likely to get me injured while running 50-60 miles a week. I had played for a few hours every week for the last 6 months, even texting KC again to ask if he’d tried it.

To me, picking up tennis again felt like it would be a chore: There was a padel court across the street from where I lived, and it felt like a more accessible sport. I wouldn’t have to buy multiple rackets or constantly think about restringing them. Padel was always played in doubles, so it also meant that I’d have to run less, which I found desirable for a “recovery” activity.

But something clicked inside when my friend asked, and I found myself signing up for an “advanced beginner” class that night, and renting a tennis racket from Sports Basement (the same racket I played with, 20 generations newer).

So far, I’ve hit for about 5 hours, and it has been a journey.

When I picked up the tennis racket from the store, it felt like a familiar, foreign instrument. The grip looked so much longer than I remember (padel rackets are meant for one hand vs. two), but the shape, balance, and feel of it spinning it in my hand felt oddly familiar.

At class the next day, the first 10-15 minutes were rough, but - and I’m not sure anyone has ever had this experience before - I went on the fastest re-learning journey over the next hour and a half. Muscle memory is genuinely a strange thing, and I never thought the phrase “just like riding a bike” applied to anything other than riding a bike, but as I hit my first overhead in 20 years, I thought, “this is brilliant”, and “I just need to hit a few thousand balls and I’ll be back where I left off”.

I’ve played a few more times this week, and it’s been amusing to see what has changed, and what’s stayed the same.

I remember, back then, not being able to feed balls properly, because it’s this weird thing done with a continental/chopper grip and I never felt the need to practice it. After months of using that same grip to hit a bunch of forehands and backhands in padel, I suddenly found myself able to do it on a tennis court.

The biggest revelation so far has been that I think my contact lens prescription back then was really messed up. Those three years, I always thought that tennis was this really hard sport because it was so difficult to see the ball. I wasn’t blind by any means, but I had a lot of trouble with depth perception, and I thought it was just because I was bad at sports and that professionals had better eyesight than me. It was most embarrassing when serving - I would toss the ball in the air, look up at it, but have no idea how high it was and so would often shank the ball or miss completely.

This morning, I hit the first serves I’ve hit in 20 years, and when I tossed the ball up, it was right there, and I could just hit it. I was suddenly serving better than I had been all those years ago, and couldn’t help but turn to one of the other classmates who I’d told this story to and say: “I feel like a kid again”.