Winter Tennis

Where you live helps determine how you will develop as a tennis player.
Anne Arundel County Maryland is a great place to learn to play tennis. I grew up there and the community support for playing tennis was and is ideal except for the weather. I spent winters contemplating spring while hoping that soon I would be out on the tennis court if the weather warmed even momentarily.

Accept the limitations of your environment and work around them.
Despite this climate, Anne Arundel County has a tremendous amount of tennis opportunity for junior players since there are now multiple indoor clubs and numerous outdoor facilities and public courts. These vary in condition from excellent and newly resurfaced courts to courts that are barely playable. Still this gives anyone an opportunity to find an outdoor court when the weather is good.

The long hard days of winter.

In mid-February the temperature is down the 20s it often won't break the 30s. As tennis players there really isn't much to look forward to unless you have the tennis channel or lots of indoor tennis time. Back in the 1960’s and 1970’s there were few options for a junior tennis player because there was no tennis channel and indoor tennis time was hard to come by unless your parents were fully committed to your game. I would scrape together some money from my part-time job back then and play once every few weeks with some high school friends at a local indoor club. Other than that, I spent the winters doing tricks with my with my old Poncho Gonzales wooden racket. And if my parents weren’t home I would stand a foot away from the wall in my bedroom or basement and practice volleys and half volleys.

To paraphrase Shakespeare and Thomas Paine in relation to what I was going through as a young tennis player , “this was my long winter of discontent,” I used to dream of living in Florida when I was a junior knowing I could be outside in warm weather playing tennis and doing just about anything else. Instead, I generally spent my time in front of a TV set or reading through the winter. Later I took up basketball since that was free and provided lots of physical activity. 40 years later I'm still here, but at least I have indoor time to fill the gap and that is my recommendation for you.

Accept your place in the pecking order of tennis or find a way to play year round.
Bottom line: if you want to be a tennis player in any location where winter outdoor tennis is unavailable, you'd better play indoors or you're unlikely to improve enough but to become strong tournament player. Find a way to get into an indoor league, team, or purchase your own indoor time even if it means renting a ball machine too. Without this effort throughout the winter it is very difficult to hold onto the improvements in your game that you accomplished in the previous outdoor tennis season.


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