IT WAS THE day I put the tennis balls into the tumble dryer that I realised I thought about tennis a little bit differently. I had started coaching some local kids in Dunblane, and it was – to put it mildly – a shoestring operation. Tennis balls are expensive, and I had barely any money. I wasn’t working as my boys were just toddlers, and when I was coaching I didn’t charge; I just asked the parents of the kids I was teaching to wheel Jamie and Andy round the duck pond near the tennis courts in their buggy. Those tennis balls were precious, and they were getting trashed.
The town had just four courts, all outdoors, and it was almost always either freezing cold, blowing a gale, or pouring with rain. When artificial grass gets wet, it behaves like a carpet: it becomes totally sodden. Even when it stopped raining the sun was rarely strong enough to dry the court out properly, so the rainwater would be absorbed by the tennis balls, the balls would get heavier and heavier, and before long the kids could barely hit them. And to make matters worse, the balls began to stink. I knew if I couldn’t find a solution to freezing cold tennis with pungent soggy balls, the children of Dunblane would just find another sport and there would be even less tennis in my home town.
At first, I tried putting the balls on the radiators at home, but that made the entire house smell of damp. Then I tried the tumble dryer. Results were mixed the first time: the sand that had come off the court with the rainwater clogged up the machine, and the rubber seals around the felt of the balls started to heat up, bubble and lift off. There was also the noise: twenty tennis balls rattling around a tumble dryer does not help a rowdy toddler take a lunchtime nap. Finally, I realised that if I put the tennis balls into an old cloth bag that had come with a pair of boots a while back, the plan would work. The fabric kept most of the sand at bay, and the bag kept the balls closer together in the machine. The balls lived on, and so did tennis in Dunblane.
Tricks like these ended up becoming something of a speciality: adapting to get as much tennis played regardless of the facilities – and the weather – making the best of what we had to hand, prioritising having fun with the kids over having the best kit. And I didn’t mind a bit. As I pressed ‘power’ on the dryer that first time and quietly congratulated myself on nailing the art of tennis-ball maintenance, I truly believed, in that moment, that anything was possible – the sky was the limit! It’s just that when you tell yourself that, you don’t actually expect that feeling to last … let alone come true.