Behind every point, game, set, match, and tournament won or lost is the beautiful struggle of life as a junior tennis player. Behind the wins and losses are the sweat, blood, and tears that make it special. There are the lifelong memories of hanging out with your friends during tournaments—messing around in the hotel, going to dinner, or playing mini-tennis in the parking lot because there are no warm-up courts. The emotions, good and bad, are what make this life special.
Being a junior tennis player trying to become as good as you can be is very hard, especially when you are forced to figure a lot of things out yourself. From the moment I first picked up a racket, I knew I wanted to try to make a life out of tennis. I didn’t grow up training at an academy like a lot of players do these days. When I would go to tournaments and have to play someone I knew trained at an academy, I would feel a strong determination to beat them. Not because I hated academy players, but because I wanted to prove to myself that I didn’t need the resources they had—that I could compete at the highest level while relying on myself to train and develop my game. I wasn’t completely on my own, though. My dad introduced me to tennis and instilled in me the belief and work ethic required to become someone special. He has trained me since I was six years old, and he still trains me today. I’m now 19.
The point is, I never had the luxury of the structure that academies provide—the gyms, personalized workout routines, recovery equipment, mobility routines, multiple coaches, nutrition plans, and everything else that comes with them. I always knew I needed to prepare my body before practice by eating well, stretching, warming up properly, and hydrating. I knew I needed to stretch and recover after practice. I knew I needed to lift weights, work on getting faster, and improve my mobility. The problem was that knowing I needed to do these things and knowing exactly how and when to do them were two very different things. Without that structure, it was easy to lose discipline and let some of those things fall by the wayside. It made me wonder how much better I could become if I lived at an academy and had people around me making sure I did them. That’s why I created Acemore—to solve the problem I had spent years trying to solve for myself, and the same problem faced by junior tennis players around the world.
Acemore became the structure I had always wished I had. Instead of waking up each day knowing there were a hundred little things I should be doing, but having to figure out when and how to do them on my own, Acemore brought those pieces together into one plan built around my life. It knew when I practiced, when I competed, when I had school or other commitments, and what I was trying to improve, then helped organize the work around it—when to lift, when to train speed and power, when to recover and work on mobility, what to eat around practice, and when to simply back off. And when life inevitably changed, the plan could change with it. For the first time, I didn't have to constantly ask myself, What should I be doing right now to become a better player? I could open Acemore and know. It didn't give me the facilities of an academy or put a team of coaches around me. It gave me something I had spent my entire junior career trying to create for myself: structure.
Acemore isn’t about replacing coaches, academies, parents, or the people who help us become better players. It’s about giving every serious player access to the structure that can be so difficult to create on your own. I built Acemore for the player who wants more out of themselves—the player who knows they could be doing more but doesn’t always know what, when, or how. I built it for the player traveling to tournaments with their family, figuring out what to eat before a match, trying to fit a workout between practice and school, or lying in bed wondering whether they did enough that day. I know that player because I was that player. And if Acemore can help someone spend less time figuring out how to become better and more time actually becoming better, then it has done exactly what I created it to do.