🎾 Tennis Progress

My new hobby 🎾

I moved to Atlanta in the summer of 2025, and since then my work-life balance got a lot better. With more free time, I started playing tennis again and taking lessons at the Piedmont Park Tennis Center with Tino, and I’ve been slowly getting better at it.

In January 2026, I joined the USTA Atlanta Ladders. I played in the “Men’s 2.5-3.0 Ladder” during the Winter and Spring seasons.

If you don’t know how a ladder works: it’s pretty relaxed. Even if you lose, you still get points, because the main goal is just to get people playing and challenging each other more, not to punish you for a bad match. That made it a good low-pressure way to get real match experience, instead of just hitting balls against a wall by myself. I tried to play as much as I could, and it worked out okay — I got top 10 twice, and got 2 bag tags. I’ll keep them on my bag forever now.

It is worth noting that my friend Bo Cui joined the same ladder during the spring season. He is more experienced than me. I challenged him 6 times and lost 6 times 😂. But I learned and improved along the way, 4 of those 6 losses went to a 3rd set. My result for the season was 5 wins and 11 losses, so it wasn’t as bad as it looks, if we ignore my losses to him.

Then on July 4th, I finally tried my first real USTA tournament: Level 7 - SCCTA Adult 2.5, 3.0 & 3.5 Classic. I signed up for the 3.0 group.

Since it was my first tournament, I was very nervous, and I had too many double faults. The first match went 0-4, 0-4, and I lost pretty badly. But in the second match, I was more relaxed. I came back from 0-3 to win the first set 5-3, and was 2-0 in the 2nd set. Then it started raining and we couldn’t finish the match. Since I was ahead, my opponent kindly gave me the win instead of trying to reschedule. So in the end I got 2nd place! The tournament even had a trophy prepared for 2nd place. It is my precious now.

I also recently registered on UTR. Here is my profile: Jian Chen.