Firstballtolast

Greetings and welcome to my new project, First Ball To Last, A Tennis Mental Health and Wellness Initiative. Mental Health has been in the news a great deal of late. Teenage rates of anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and self-harm have skyrocketed recently, so much so the Surgeon General of the United States issued a national mental health advisory declaring US teen's declining mental health as the crisis of our time.    In our world of tennis, former world #1 Naomi Osaka had to step away from the game after going public with her mental struggles. Former American tennis star Mardy Fish had a Netflix documentary made about his mid-career anxiety and panic attacks, the mercurial Australian star Nick Kyrgios has  struggled mightily on and off the court with his mental wellness and to a lesser degree, Australian Ash Barty quit tennis as the #1 player in the world, the 2nd time she walked away from our great sport. Someone who trains their whole lives to bec...

"It's easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." Frederick Douglass Recent societal trends in mental health are concerning. Thirty years ago, the risks to children were external; drinking, drugs, smoking, teenage pregnancy. Today, statistics in those areas have dropped dramatically. But a new scourge affects our youth today, with these issues being internal. The mental health conditions of depression, anxiety, mania, self-harming, suicide and suicidal ideation continue to rise at alarming rates, placing today's youth squarely in the midst of a mental health crisis. The tennis world has not been immune from these trends. In 2021, a public conversation began about mental health and the struggles of competition. Mardy Fish's Netflix documentary about his panic disorders, Naomi Osaka's personal struggles with anxiety and depression went very public, and Nick Kyrgios' constant on court meltdowns have the professional tennis world in a quandary....