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Seven Life Lessons from Playing Tennis
I learned more than tennis skills after playing the sport over the years. They are life lessons that I am now taking out of the court.
I am not a very athletic person by any stretch of the imagination. Growing up, I was a rather shy and weak child who would often fall sick. Naturally, I shunned away from sports.
Tennis, however, completely changed my disposition. I had a slow start, and it took many years to be good enough to play with other people. But once I crossed the high threshold, I fell in love with tennis.
After playing tennis for quite some time, I learned something other than tennis skills. I summarized them as seven life lessons I am taking from the tennis court.
1. Play by the rules
Tennis has a very strange way of counting points. Instead of 1, 2, and 3, the points are counted as Love, Fifteen, Thirty, Forty, and Game. Love is from the French word “L’Oeuf” which is pronounced as “love’ and means “the egg.” That makes sense since an egg looks like the number zero.
But then the next number is Fifteen and Thirty. Okay? So you would think the number series is Fifteen multiples. Wrong! The next number is Forty. By then you have to give up on trying to make sense of the numbering system.
Tennis numbering is only the beginning of more confusing tennis rules. The server (the player whose turn is to serve the ball to the opponent) has to alternate between two half-sides of the court, starting from the right. In the beginning, I was really confused and often stood on the wrong side.
The court boundaries shift depending on whether you play singles or doubles matches. Singles use the inside lines, whereas doubles extend the boundaries to the outermost lines.
Whether weird or not, I had to learn the rules by heart to play the game. If you do not like the rules, play a different sport. As long as you play…
