Our USTA team was supposed to play in Durham at Elmira Avenue Park yesterday evening, but alas it was not to be. Apparently the app said one thing, the web site another. You know the drill. By the time we figured it out it was too late to portage over to the other park so we had to take a DQ.
In any case Eric S, Meng and I hit around for a while on these hard courts in a hardscrabble part of Durham, surrounded by a large squad of Black kids under the watchful eye of a couple of coaches. It was a little embarrassing to be out there with my largely untrained, scrappy club players game while these kids, some as young as 10 or so, maybe, were smacking the ball with near perfect form and adding a lot of pace to the ball, given their small size.
I found myself wondering: what's going on here? Who are these coaches, these would-be Richard Williams types? Do the kids play for their schools and kick ass? Does the tennis end up helping them go to better colleges and have more fulfilling careers? Or am I just projecting a bunch of narratives on them? Part of me wants to ride back over there and learn more, but probably I should just Google it. As we learn going through life, we can't do everything.
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