Noah Rubin’s “Behind The Racquet” • With • Arantxa Rus | Tennis 10sBalls

Editor’s note: 10sBalls thanks Noah Rubin for giving us permission to repost these great stories. We wish him and this endeavor the best of luck. Great seeing Noah wearing K-Swiss and playing Solinco Strings.

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“I grew up in the Netherlands close to Hague. I started to play tennis when I was about five or six years old. I had an older sister who brought me to the tennis club with her one day. I played other sports but it was never the same feeling as tennis. I enjoyed it more than others so I knew it was the one I would choose. I started playing tournaments around nine or ten, and I was good at just playing for fun and enjoying the competition. At seventeen I finished school and began traveling outside of home with a group of other players. It isn’t an easy decision for people to choose whether to continue to study or play full time. For me it wasn’t even a thought, I needed to play, practice and see how far I could move up the rankings. Coming from a Jr. Grand Slam title in Australia, I was confident in how I would do on tour. I moved up really quickly to top 100 but then had a few difficult years where my ranking dropped. It’s a tough battle when you begin to lose to people who you have beaten and then you begin to have no confidence. I wasn’t used to losing over and over like this. I began to feel a new pressure where I felt the need to stop playing tennis. I somehow managed to keep going. During that year where I pushed through, I learned a lot about myself. I was fighting the idea that I wasn’t good enough. Once you fall outside the top 100 for a few years, you know you can do better but you just aren’t sure if you are able to. I was just not believing in myself. I was fortunate to have parents that always supported me but I didn’t have a coach I trusted to help me through this. As you get older you start to overthink far more than you did when you were younger and were just easily pushing forward. I knew I needed a change and I switched coaches after five years of having the same one. I had no guidance if it was the right decision but I felt that I needed to do everything completely different. I had to do the opposite of what I was already doing for the past five years or so. I was questioning it along the way for the first few months because I didn’t see any results. To completely change countries for training and still not see results makes you question everything. After about four months, my coach and I finally connected, just had to get used to the way he worked. He was really straight forward with the way he spoke to me, right to my face, which I now know is what I actually needed. You have to fight every day to get into the top 100. You worry about so many things, like travel and paying for a coach that it is tough to focus on tennis. My coach helped me get my confidence back, but not everyone is as lucky.” Arantxa Rus (arantxarus1)

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