Recreational Refuge: Five stories of tennis' social-distance salvation

We talked to five recreational players from the United States and Canada about how it felt to be back on court after the early coronavirus shutdowns eased this summer; how the sport has changed for them; and what they appreciate about it now that they may never have appreciated about it before.

“I’ve got a game at noon today,” Christen Bartelt says, happily, from her home in Southern California. That’s not surprising. An attorney who lettered in tennis at Duke in the late ’80s, Bartelt can be found at the courts four or five times a week.

Nice courts, too: She plays at the Malibu Racquet Club, where members can get their game faces on as they gaze out at the Pacific Ocean. After closing for two months as Los Angeles County tried, semi-successfully, to flatten the coronavirus curve, the MRC reopened in May. That wasn’t a moment too soon for Bartelt, a net-rusher who had seen more than enough of her television set over the course of the quarantine.

“I don’t think I understood the mental-health aspects of tennis the way I do now,” Bartelt says. “On the court I can take my mind off the pandemic and everything else for an hour and a half. I love how tennis fully grabs my attention.”

Of course, reminders of the outside world abound. As of June, the MRC’s clubhouse and indoor restaurant were closed, and the TV screen where members gathered to watch pro matches was turned off. You could have a burger outside, but you had to keep your distance while you ate it.

“You go straight from your car to the courts,” Bartelt says. “You don’t even see who was on the court before you.”

The water dispensers are touchless, and the courtside chairs are spaced far apart. Members began to label their own balls, so Bartelt bought a set that were colored pink for breast-cancer awareness, until one of the men at the club joked, “I’m not gonna play with pink tennis balls!”

Yet Bartelt says the pandemic-era changes, rather than taking away from her enjoyment of the game, have put the focus on what matters most: The time spent on court.

“It’s more of a pure tennis experience now, like playing at a public park,” she says. “Either way, it’s this little magical escape.”

According to Bartelt, there’s even an upside to not seeing other people at the club.

“You don’t have to talk about the news!”

What’s the secret to success at a tennis facility these days? According to Greg Moran, owner of the Four Seasons Racquet Club in Wilton, Conn., it starts and ends with two S words: safety and stress.

“The most important thing is to try to make this a stress-free zone for people,” Moran says.

To that end, he’s taken doors off the courts, kept every surface scrubbed to a sanitized sheen, equipped his teaching pros with safety kits, and made sure members know that wearing a mask is mandatory. So far he’s only had to kick one guy out for refusing.

“We tap racquets, we cough into our elbows,” says Moran, whose club has indoor and outdoor courts. “I try to keep the doubles from getting too in-your-face.”

Sometimes it’s still not enough. Even as the case rate declined in hard-hit Connecticut over the summer, the fears lingered.

“I have a member who’s 73 and was so scared she probably didn’t leave her house for a month,” Moran says. “When she came to the club, she opened the car window a tiny crack, like she thought the virus was going to jump up and get her. So we hit for 45 minutes, and she said, ‘You know, Greg, I feel safe.’”

Moran’s efforts paid off. While he had to close for two months, he says that, with some help from a federal PPP loan, he’s in good financial shape. “99 percent” of his members have been supportive, he says, and most were willing to do whatever it takes, and more, to play again.

“I had people emailing me, asking when we were opening, saying ‘I promise I’ll wear a glove!’” Moran says.

Moran is also a teaching pro, and during the lockdown he found himself craving the connection he has with his students.

“I missed teaching big time,” he says. “You can shut everything else out and just focus on helping someone get better.”

When his club shifts indoors this winter, Moran will have to limit the courts to 50 percent capacity. But whatever the restrictions are, he’ll stick with the only mantra a business owner can have these days: If you make them feel safe, they will come.

Candice Combdon didn’t know that a sport called wheelchair tennis existed until she was 25. Growing up in Ontario, she had watched the pro game on television, and had marveled at what stars like Novak Djokovic did with a racquet. But she never imagined she would pick one up one herself.

“I was a kid who stayed inside most of the time,” Combdon says. She had tried playing wheelchair basketball and sledge hockey, a version of ice hockey adapted for people with disabilities. “But they weren’t my sports.”

Tennis was. From the first time she tried it, she “fell in love instantly.”

What made the difference? Her answer may sound familiar.

“I liked that it was a solo sport, and that nobody else was responsible for what happened,” says Combdon, who works an administrator at a physio clinic in Barre, Ontario. “I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like to disappoint people. In tennis, if I do well, I feel like I deserved it.”

Seven years later, Combdon plays wheelchair tennis for Team Ontario. She plays five days a week, and has a coach who “doesn’t let me get lazy.”

“But I’m still pretty far down on the totem pole,” she jokes.

Rather than seeing her progress stall during Ontario’s three-week lockdown, though, Combdon came back a stronger player when it was over.

“I was totally focused on my fitness,” she says. “I was doing strength training and mobility drills at home, and it made a big difference.”

Still, there’s nothing like playing.

“When the quarantine started, I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’ Combdon says. “Tennis is my lifeline. As soon as the courts reopened, I was right back out there. It was such a great feeling just to be moving on the court again.”

Combdon was disappointed when the US Open initially dropped the wheelchair competition, and thrilled when it was reinstated. The game has allowed her to do something she never thought she could do, and Combdon hopes the Open’s wheelchair event might do the same thing someday.

“I want to play in that tournament,” she says.

John Mogulescu doesn’t have a big serve. He avoids hitting his backhand whenever he can. He hates the net. At 74, he claims he has lost a step. But don’t tell that to his opponents, many of whom are decades younger than he is. They know he can still track down their best shots, still send laser-like forehands past them and still launch towering lobs that somehow, to their immense frustration, land right on the baseline.

Around the clay courts at the Knickerbocker Field Club in Brooklyn, N.Y., “Johnny Mo” is a legend. He has won the club championship four times, and at one stage he reached the final 13 years in a row. A smooth-swinging lefty who played tennis and basketball at Brown in the late ’60s, he has remained mostly injury-free, and has never left the stresses of singles behind for doubles.

But when the coronavirus swept into New York City, Mogulescu, a dean at The City University of New York, was forced to put his racquet down. It wasn’t easy. As the Zoom meetings piled up at home, he tried walking to relax. It just reminded him of why he plays tennis.

“When I take a walk, my mind wanders all over the place,” Mogulescu says. “The world goes away when I’m concentrating on the ball. Tennis is such a stress reliever that way.”

When the Knickerbocker reopened in June, some of its older clientele initially stayed away. But Mogulescu was there from day one.

“It’s a bit bizarre,” he says of the pandemic protocols at the club, where players use two sets of balls and pump the hand-washing machines early and often. “You want to be careful, but you want to be relaxed.”

The Knickerbocker is home to some of Brooklyn’s most dedicated tennis lifers, and the courts have grown more crowded. The political discussions that once heated up the clubhouse now take place at a distance, on the lawn outside, and over the roar of the nearby Q train.

As for Mogulescu, he’s happy to get his stress relief and go.

“My timing was off when I came back,” he says. “And I’m feeling a little weaker, so my shots are landing shorter.”

His opponents have heard it all before.

“I thought, ‘I just won’t play,’” Terri Coleman says. “‘I’m not going to play.’”

“I really didn’t want to play.”

That’s what Coleman told herself for much of the spring, when the coronavirus came to her hometown

of Oakland, Calif. The clubs and public facilities where she normally plays had closed, and the multiple USTA leagues she normally joins had been suspended. Some people in the area were climbing the fences to get back on court, but that wasn’t for her. At 62, she suddenly found herself in a vulnerable age group.

Even when things began to open up again, she wondered: Is tennis worth the risk?

“I saw so many infractions,” she says. “People not wearing masks, or wearing them around their necks. It seemed like the virus could be easily transmitted.”

But it was hard to stay away.

Coleman picked up the sport in her 40s, and retains a late-convert’s enthusiasm for it.

“I always wanted to do it,” she says. “And then I finally just decided to do it, and I caught the tennis bug and I can’t get rid of it.”

Before the virus, Coleman played nearly every day. Now she missed her tennis friends. She missed hanging around on the bleachers at league matches. She missed getting exercise, and the walking trails near her were too crowded for comfort. So when a friend asked her to play, she weighed the risks and said yes.

“You’re kind of automatically six feet apart in tennis,” she says. “But things are different now.”

The bleachers are empty and wrapped in plastic. She and her doubles partners drink their water alone during changeovers. But she still has the bug, and by summer she was back at it twice a week.

“It was a little awkward moving at first,” Coleman says. “But I was happy just to stand on a tennis court again. It was like seeing an old friend.”