Well, my mum's been a tennis coach - she coached me till I was 12.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I started tennis around age 2.
My mom, she's from Ireland, coached tennis in Nigeria when she was a missionary and turned me on to it when I was young.
I've been athletic since I was a kid. My parents got me playing tennis when I was seven years old and I started to play competitively.
I started when I was 8 years old, which is obviously nowadays pretty late, but I guess in my generation it was all right. I had plenty of other interests and I didn't do only tennis.
When I was eight and a half, my parents moved to a part of Queens where there was a club nearby. We joined, and if you believe in someone up above, I think I was meant to play tennis.
One day my dad would say, 'OK, if you want to play tennis I can help you out.' And that's how it started. And I had a goal. I wanted to beat my mom first. And my parents and my brother. And that was the ultimate goal.
As a kid, I wanted to be a pro tennis player. I was pretty good; at the tennis academies I attended, I always 'played up' against older age groups.
Both my parents were amateur badminton players. My father is a scientist and wanted me to be a doctor. But my mom was very aggressive and loved badminton. She pushed me right from the age of nine to take up the sport.
I was being groomed to be a tennis player for sure. My grandparents and parents realised I had a natural athletic ability and if I was forced to do it, I could probably do well. But all I wanted was to play pretend.
I started when I was six years old. My first coach was my granny, she was the best player in Slovakia.