This post marks the beginning of the first weekend installment of the Tennis Glow-Up series, which will unfold over the first full weekend of each month throughout 2026. As introduced yesterday, each month will focus on a single self-improvement theme explored through three connected posts. January’s focus is purpose, the foundation on which every other aspect of this year’s exploration rests.
However, before purpose can be fully considered, your tennis identity must first be well understood. Identity and purpose are inextricable. If your sense of identity and purpose is misaligned, cognitive dissonance follows. That creates tension between how you see yourself and what you are trying to achieve. That disconnect shows up as frustration and dissatisfaction. Purpose states where we are going, while identity defines what it all means.
To the rest of the world, articulating identity as a tennis player or fan is sufficient detail. However, within the sport, those terms are too broad. The kind of people who gravitate to this blog likely have a layered sense of their tennis selves. For those of us who still step onto the court, there is some nuance tied to that. For example, identity might be stated as a competitive player, a recreational player, a coach, or a facilitator. Similarly, for those who engage with tennis off the court, identity might revolve around supporting and creating opportunities for some aspect of our sport to thrive.
If you ask an active, competitive player to describe themselves, familiar, predefined labels will quickly emerge. Tom Gullikson coined four playing styles in a Tennis magazine article published in the early 1990s. That included Serve and Volley, Aggressive Baseliner, Counter Puncher, and the All-Court Player. Today, a player might describe themselves as a Grinder, a Backboard, a Doubles Specialist, or even a Mental Headcase. These labels are descriptive but can also be prescriptive. They draw boundaries around behavior and establish expectations for success and failure. Once internalized, identity becomes the lens through which purpose is filtered.
A player may say their purpose is to improve, but their identity prioritizes safety and predictability. Another may claim to love competition, yet identify primarily as someone who “just plays for fun.” When identity and stated purpose conflict, actions follow identity almost every time. Purpose becomes aspirational language. Identity dictates behavior.
As a quick tangent, I believe burnout often stems from misalignment between identity and purpose. When those two factors drift apart, participation feels burdensome. People experiencing burnout typically keep competing, training, captaining, volunteering, or showing up, but that engagement is out of obligation rather than intention. On-court time is devoid of joy or any restorative quality. Off the court, league administration, team dynamics, and governance issues start to feel personally draining rather than rewarding. What is actually being depleted is not energy, but coherence. Burnout is the cumulative effect of sustaining roles and behaviors that no longer reflect who a person believes themselves to be or why they are involved in the sport at all.
Identity influences how much effort a person believes they should invest, how seriously they take the sport, whether they volunteer, coach, captain, or avoid leadership roles altogether. It governs how comfortable someone feels challenging norms, questioning rules, or advocating for fairness. Tennis identity shapes not only how we play, but how we participate in the broader ecosystem of the sport.
Stress and duress expose misalignment most clearly. Under pressure, players do not rise to purpose. Rather, they retreat to identity. Identity becomes a form of self-regulation, keeping us inside familiar lanes even when our stated goals require something else.
Identity also changes over time, whether or not it is recognized or acknowledged. Age alters it. Injury reshapes it. Life constraints recalibrate it. When players cling to outdated identities, dissatisfaction is inevitable. Measuring current engagement against an outdated self-concept is fertile ground for discontent. The problem arises when the evolution of identity and purpose goes unexamined.
As another quick aside, this line of thinking offers an interesting angle on why so many junior players leave the sport after their junior or college eligibility expires. Rather than recognizing the changes brought on by their new phase of life and recrafting their tennis identity to align with their new purpose and responsibilities, they drop tennis altogether.
In any case, an effective transformation cannot occur until identity is well understood and purpose is aligned with intent. The whole point of the Tennis Glow-Up is to emerge as your best and most authentic self. That starts with understanding who you are. Naming the identity you bring into the sport is the first essential step to understanding it. Purpose cannot be developed in isolation but rather has to be grounded in who you believe you are and who you want to become.
The next two posts this weekend will build directly on that foundation, with purpose firmly in view. Saturday’s post will focus on purpose as intention, considering what you are actually trying to get from tennis and how unexamined goals quietly shape effort, motivation, and satisfaction. The final post on Sunday will explore purpose as alignment, showing how a clearly defined purpose simplifies decisions, reduces burnout, and restores agency in how we choose to engage with the game.
Great read Teresa!