Tessa’s year in review

This was the season Tessa added a soft game to a hard one. She came in as the player whose hands looked better than her results: a drive on every third ball, a habit of getting stuck in the middle of the court, and nerves that came out as over-hitting. She's leaving it trusting a third-shot drop, getting to the kitchen line, and waiting for the ball that's actually worth attacking. The hands were never the project. The project was the drop, the trip through the transition zone, and the patience at the line. Not all of it is finished (the drive still sneaks back on the tightest points), but the list got shorter, and her game finally has two halves.

The bracket win that came from a drop. A May junior tournament, 9-9 in the semifinal, and on a deep return she dropped it instead of driving it, walked up behind it, and won the hands battle that followed at the kitchen line. That's the whole season in one point: soft to get there, fast once she's there.

The March event that framed the season. An early tournament where she drove nearly every third ball, got caught mid-court over and over, and lost two close pool games she could have won. It stung, and it became the clearest to-do list of the spring.

The erne everyone remembers, and the drops nobody noticed. She hit a real erne in a round robin in April, and the whole row of courts clapped. The part that actually changed her season was the bucket of third-shot drops, hundreds of them, from the baseline on quiet weekday evenings.

The sore elbow in April. Pickleball most days, on top of tennis, and her elbow started to complain. We took it as a signal, not something to play through: two rest days a week since, and it hasn't come back. Worth keeping as a lesson, too.

Tessa competes, and she doesn't flinch at adults, which is a real asset in a sport where kids share courts with grown-ups every week. Her hands are still the first thing anyone notices, and they're genuine. The change that mattered most wasn't technical: it was learning that the soft shot isn't the timid choice, it's how you earn the chance to use your hands. Her DUPR climbed from 3.2 to 3.6 over the spring, and it climbed because the drop came in, not because anyone was chasing the number.

The hands and the drive are genuine strengths and always were. The third-shot drop is real and getting more automatic; the next step is trusting it on the biggest points of a bracket. The trip through the transition zone is steadier with the split step, and the patience at the kitchen line holds most of the time, especially when adults try to speed her up. And the between-points routine with her partner has gone from something she had to remember to something she does. She's a player with a soft game now, not just fast hands, and her results are starting to match what her hands could always do.