I have always been athletic, a bit shy and totally determined to achieve something when I have a goal. I started trampolining on our family trampoline before I was two years old. I would spend my days on the tramp or riding my scooter. As I grew, I expanded into trampolining, mountain biking, snowboarding and parkour. Finding a challenge and working my way through it to accomplish a flip or trick became obsessive at times. When our family moved to a small town in Florida, snow boarding and parkour were not available, it took me some time to figure out what my new endeavor would be. I maintained as much parkour as possible and created challenges like my year doing squat hops multiple times per day. I set a timer for multiple times per day and when it went off no matter what was going on I would do squat jumps, by the end of the year I was doing 100 jumps at a time 5 times a day. In 2019 my dad took me to play tennis with him. I really enjoyed it but I wanted to take lessons so I could play him better. It became my challenge to beat him. We each took a biweekly lesson. I fell in love with tennis. I wanted to learn as much about it as I could. Covid hit in 2020 when I was 12. My retired coach who was helping me learn my form was unable to continue to coach me. There was a local coach offering a team environment and I joined. I played every day. I barely put down my racket. I was shadow swinging, working on my fitness and watching tennis matches, training videos and anything tennis I could. In July of 2020 I entered my first tournaments. I was a nervous wreck. But by December, I was winning tournaments and ready to take on the next tier tournaments At group lessons, as I was training for a high level tournament against academy kids, I tripped on the court and broke my radial bone. It was devastating for me but I figured out I could still continue to grow in tennis even though I couldn’t be out on the court. Although I was in a cast and was told to not play, I couldn’t put my racket down. I started doing everything I could to maintain, worked on stamina, strength, studied even more intently and worked on perfecting my form. By end of March I received the all clear, and I was back on the court every day. My first tournament back in April I made it to the finals. The next tournament in April, I won. A shoulder injury gave me a pause and I was out till June. Since then, I have made it to the finals several times and won the consolation draws against players in the top ranks in the state in Level 5 and 6 tournaments. My nerves have played a part in my losses in some of these upper level tournaments and my confidence called into question but this has only spurred me to bring in mental training, breathwork and mindset work to help me reach the next level. Another injury and a terminal condition for my grandma sidelined me. I felt like I needed a technical coach because I felt like I was missing something with my techniques but going two plus hours away to train was difficult. So I talked it over with my parents what I was looking for and they told me that I needed to believe I would have just what I needed when the time was right for me to have it. AND that is exactly what happened. Today I am training locally with a super seasoned technical coach who has taken me through leaps and bounds in just a short time. We have a plan and he is excited to be a part of what I can do next.