tennis for the people

I didn’t set out to start anything. That’s probably important to say at the beginning. It wasn’t a plan, and certainly not a business idea. I didn’t write it down in a journal or make a vision board. It just happened. First as something social, something small, a way to pass time in a city where time is both elastic and expensive. We started playing tennis. That’s all.

There wasn’t even a name at first. It was just a loose group of friends hitting on public courts. At some point someone asked, “Wait, what are we calling this?” And it was only then—after the fact, really -- that I began to think about what it was becoming. The Mission Athletic Club, we called it and it quickly gained footing as TMAC. Though naming something doesn’t always clarify what it is.

I didn’t grow up playing tennis. No one in my family belonged to a club, or would have imagined paying hundreds of dollars a month to reserve court time. I remember flipping through the channels, while stumbling across the French Open one morning, maybe I was thirteen. Nadal sliding across the clay, headband soaked through, his whole body moving like a single uninterrupted line. It was athletic, yes, but also aesthetic -- like watching someone paint with their feet. I think that was the first time I felt whatever it is people mean by love at first sight.

But loving something doesn’t mean it’s easy to reach. For over a decade, I chased tennis around the edges of my life – playing with whoever was free, when we could find a court, when we could afford the time. It never really stuck. My friends moved away, our schedules changed, the courts were booked or locked or suddenly had a lesson on them. I started to think that casual tennis might just be a logistical impossibility. A thing for people with private access.

And then, in the spring of 2023, something shifted. One of my best friends had just quit his job. I had also, coincidentally, left mine. We found ourselves both unmoored and a little giddy with time. For weeks we played tennis almost every day. The courts, I should say, were free to access – which for two unemployed people was critical.

There are nearly 150 public courts in San Francisco, something that feels more and more like a political miracle the longer I live here. We played in the fog, in the wind, in Golden Gate Park, on cracked courts in the Mission, under the terrifying buzz of high-voltage lights. We played in neighborhoods I’d never had a reason to visit before. I started to feel like the city had been hiding itself from me, and now – just through this small, joyful habit – it was slowly revealing its interior.

By the time summer ended, other people had joined. Friends of friends, and their friends. We called our first program “Volleys & Vibes” as a joke, but the name stuck. The format was simple: a fast-paced rotation of doubles king-of-the-court, soundtracked by a playlist I curated the night before. Eventually we added rituals; intros, ball warm-ups, closing circles, and ball tosses. I still don’t know if it was the structure or the spirit that made it work, but somehow it did. People showed up. I mean, really showed up; on time, with energy, and ready to play. There were 20 or 30 people on the waitlist for almost every session. No one paid anything. That was the part I didn’t expect: the reliability. In the era of Partiful, where everyone is everywhere and nowhere at once, it felt oddly sincere to see people not just RSVP but arrive – early, even. And then stay late, not for the optics, but because they didn’t want to leave. I had always been told that if you want people to commit, you have to charge them. That “free” means “flaky.” That may be true for some things. But not this.

We ended up running over 125 events in a single year. A handful of socials, three tournaments and nearly 3,500 individual check-ins. The tournaments, I should say, we charged for – because we had to. Private courts, insurance, permits. They broke even. Everything else was done on a shoestring and good will. It never motivated me to make this a business. I have a background in community organizing, and this felt like an extension of that – something you do with people, not to them. We ran a survey and learned that 75% of our players had been playing only a couple times a month before joining. Now, that’s inverse to those same individuals playing two or three times a week. Almost half had picked up tennis in the last five years. The average age is thirty. These are not country club statistics. These are people, many of them new to the sport, many without access to the institutions that normally serve as gatekeepers.

And that’s the point. If we had charged from the beginning, it wouldn’t have worked. Not just in a financial sense, though that’s certainly true – San Francisco’s poverty line is $88,000 for a single person, and many of our players hover around that – but in a cultural sense. It would have changed the way people showed up. It would have turned the community into a product. When something is free, you arrive as yourself. When something has a price, you arrive as a customer.

That difference matters. Because what we’re doing isn’t transactional, it’s relational. It’s built on attention and time and presence, and yes, play. And in that sense, it’s part of a larger question we’re all asking about this city: What kind of San Francisco do we want to live in?

Now, the Recreation & Parks Department is proposing a $5 fee for every use of a public tennis court. The stated goal is to help close a budget gap. But there’s been little clarity about where the money would actually go, or how this measure would meaningfully improve anything. What is clear is that it would alter the fabric of public tennis in this city. It would introduce friction where there is now ease, and impose a barrier where a rare kind of freedom exists—particularly at a moment when San Francisco is struggling to retain its younger residents and recover a sense of civic momentum. It would also deter access to community athletics more broadly, quietly disenfranchising low-income populations under the guise of fiscal necessity.

I’m not naive. I know that public goods cost money. But I also know that taxing the use of public space – especially in a city that prides itself on access, equity, and social services – is a political choice. And one with consequences. It may start at $5, but that number is not fixed. The logic is that if people care about something, they’ll pay for it. But the reverse is also true: if you make people pay, they may stop caring.

Personally, I play a lot. Eight hours a week, give or take. That would add up to about $160 a month. Which is, in effect, a private club membership. But unlike a private club, the public courts don’t just offer tennis – they offer belonging, friendship and community. They’re woven into the city. You stop for a coffee after your game. You walk through a park you’ve never entered before. You meet someone new, someone not like you. You learn a neighborhood by its trees and its fences and the bounce of its courts.

I can only speak for myself. But over the past 18 months, I’ve listened to hundreds of others say the same thing: that this community has brought them joy, and health, and a reason to stay in a city that doesn’t always feel like it wants you to stay. If Mission Athletic Club has taught me anything, it’s that access builds belonging. And belonging, when you let it, builds everything else.

If this letter resonates, join us on Saturday.