heart<3

so i have always been told that tennis is forty percent skill, sixty percent mental game, and one-hundred percent heart. without heart there is no point to play. when you lose heart everything else will soon be lost as well. in all honesty i lost heart this summer. i lost the love of the game. i completed the goals i made when i was eleven years old and i couldn't find any other reason to play. i was then playing for the fact that i had too, i was expected too, i didn't know how to walk away. i wanted to, i really wanted to just give it up. there was no fun in playing. when i lost heart i then started losing my confidence. i couldn't find out how to win. i didn't believe that i could make shots so i wasn't making them. it was a complete domino effect. in a matter of three months everything that made me a good player was gone(well not that i had a very good mental game anyways). last thursday i lost to some foreign exchange student in a league match, it was my first league loss in three years. my mom had said something to me after the match that she used to say about me but i hadn't heard it since december. that got my head spinning. i went on to lose the doubles match to the schools number two and four player. i lost it. i was ready to quit right then and there. my mom told me to think about it, give it the weekend and we would make a decision. the next couple of days i thought about a lot of things: why i was playing, that phrase my mom had said, why i couldn't play like i wanted to, and was i really going to let some girl from another country take my title away from me as swyl champ. i decided i was going to finish out the season. i am going to go for it all. i am going all the way. i am going to give it all i got. for the first time in three months i want to play. somehow i found out where the heart of the game was hiding, i grabbed it, and i'm holding on to it as tight as possible.