New to Tennis
Your child found tennis. Maybe at summer camp, maybe hitting against the garage door, maybe a coach pulled you aside. Before you learn anything about UTR, tournaments, or recruiting, learn this — the first three years matter more than most parents realize.
Listen in this order.
Five episodes, in sequence. They're chosen to give you honest footing.
"What I wish I'd done in the first year" — five families.
Cross-section reel auto-assembled from family-journey episodes.
Before the racquet — understanding your child
The single highest-leverage thing you can do in the first year has nothing to do with tennis. It's understanding the child you actually have, instead of the child you imagined coaching.
Choosing the first coach
Quality of day-to-day coaching is the
Age-appropriate play & the Little Mo pathway
Red ball, orange ball, green ball. Spec Tennis. Modified formats that lower the barrier to early engagement and protect kids from the most common technical bad habits.
Cost, access, and the long tail of getting started
Tennis is one of the more expensive youth sports. The episodes here are about how to start without committing to a full academy budget — and what programs exist for families where cost is a barrier.
The lines from the archive that families come back to.
"I wish someone had told me, in our first year, that the goal wasn't to get good. The goal was to keep her loving it. Everything else followed."
"We picked the academy with the nicest courts. We didn't ask a single question about how the coaches actually talk to seven-year-olds. That cost us two years."
"The Little Mo program was the first place where my daughter wasn't the youngest in the room. That changed everything for her."