top of page

Competing in USTA Tournaments

Writer's picture: Jason ChowJason Chow

Updated: Dec 17, 2024



For those of you that are interested in working on your game in the high school off-season, I strongly encourage you to become a member of the USTA!

Cost: Free. (link to USTA juniors)

A membership allows you to play junior tournaments (link here) and earn an actual ranking. More importantly, it helps students gain match experience, deepens their understanding of competition and allows them to work through problems (i.e., problem-solving on the tennis court). Match experience is not the same as tennis lessons but it is critical to the development of our skills. I equate it to a recital for a musical instrument or an exam in a student's math class. Testing our skills, especially under pressure, is an important part of the game.


Rationale: A tennis student will learn from competition in itself; how to deal with wins/losses, how to handle the mental pressure, how to deal with annoying people (all great lessons for the working world!), but in a safe environment. In Silicon Valley, I think we often have too many situations where kids are rewarded no matter the result; in my opinion, this is not the real world. Working at Google and Yelp, I faced many business challenges and often defeat, but needed to learn how to bounce back. If we practice this habit in our younger years, we are much more equipped to handle setbacks in our later years


So my personal belief is that facing difficulty and defeat helps to develop the trait known as grit. (more on Grit by Angela Duckworth, book here). I know many of you intuitively understand you didn't get to where you are by coasting or avoiding some type of failure, but IMO, our kids have far fewer opportunities to understand this feeling of competition/failure (and then bouncing back from it) than our generation did. Classroom theory is inadequate; this is something one must learn through real life experience.

Reasonable Tournament Goal: Try to compete in 2-3 official USTA tournaments by June 2024. (find tournaments here).

39 views
bottom of page