How do you become a professional athlete?

A question that many people have probably asked themselves and that no one can really answer. In today's blog I'll try to answer it from my personal perspective as a tennis professional.In the top 10 of my childhood memories is this trophy, 3rd place in the club championships at my former tennis club in Stuttgart. It must have almost certainly been in the late summer of 2003, today I'm 1.95 tall, and back then the trophy felt like it was almost as tall as me. As I already mentioned on the website, I had no interest in tennis at the first trial course when I was 4, and it wasn't until the second attempt when I was 7 that I stuck with it.And from the moment I held that first trophy, I identified myself as a tennis player. Of course, I wasn't aware of this at the time when I was almost 9 years old.

My parents didn't play competitive tennis themselves and were desperate to explain to me what a topspin ball was. I lost in the semifinals to a boy whose balls bounced so strangely, which is how I put it at the time. I wanted to learn that too, and beat him next time.My parents simply wanted to give me a nice activity with the club championships, but they certainly didn't think or hope that this would lead to the greed for trophies (and the basis of my tennis career). I annoyed my parents for so long with the question, “Where can I win the next trophy?” until they found out more at the tennis club and registered me for U10 tournaments in September.My friends often call me the elephant because I could probably tell you about my tennis vita every month since that tournament in September 2003. However, that goes beyond the scope of the blog post, so I'm finally getting closer to the answer to how you actually become a professional athlete. In my opinion it's the fun of competition and the joy of sport.

For me, it was the trophy at the beginning and then I developed a passion for competition. I always had a lot of fun playing tennis, seeing my tennis friends at tournaments and winning. Losing was also part of it, and dealing with it helped me enormously as a teenager to stay on the right track. I never wanted to smoke cigarettes or smoke weed, I had training and my next tournament. Playing well there was more important to me and fulfilled me more. I had fun as a teenager too, but it never really progressed, mainly because of tennis. The tournament radius expanded from year to year; at the beginning I played a lot in Stuttgart, then in Baden-Württemberg and finally as a teenager in Germany, Europe and once even in the USA.

Of course you have the dream of being a professional tennis player, but as a teenager you can't really imagine what it means to be a professional. At 16/17 you realize that I have to deliver results, otherwise I can no longer really justify dedicating so much time to tennis. Then you start training harder, getting better, and ultimately you want to compete against the best in Germany, Europe and around the world. Whether you can manage that and whether the financial background is provided by family or sponsors is another matter. This is just a side note because it obviously has to do with the question of how to become a professional athlete.In my opinion, joy in competition, fascination with sport and perseverance are the main factors in becoming a professional athlete. The factors sound very similar to the building blocks for success in almost all situations in life 😉

With sporty greetings

Hendrik