One 37-year old former D3 player trying to stay fit while traveling with her husband and toddler gets carried away and enters a pro tournament at the encouragement of her hotel pro. What could go wrong?

In Ashton Politanoff’s new novel, a man defenseless against his repetition compulsion unravels in chiseled and unnerving prose.

These days, American college tennis is barely that: American

Between Patrick Mouratoglou’s Ultimate Tennis Showdown, India’s Tennis Premier League, and INTENNSE, innovators are looking for ways to shorten matches, add pizzazz, and balance inequities in an attempt to draw, and keep, a younger crowd.

The vibrant and idiosyncratic still lifes—often composed on hotel stationary—are the work of artist Michael McGregor, whose roots in a “huge tennis family” inform one of his favorite themes.

Agnès Ricart is a multimedia artist from Spain who—close Racquet readers will confirm—has been a staple in our visual vocabulary for the better part of a decade. Alongside classic Racquet illustrations such as Medvedev flipping the bird at the collected crowd at the US Open, Naomi Osaka's masked protest during COVID and even a protester using a tennis racquet to clear a cannister of tear gas. Her work is vivid and cheeky, and can be seen across the world from The Guardian to Die Ziet to the Economist. We asked her to bring to life an ode to the tennis ball in our latest issue, and to sit down for a Q&A about her artistic practice.

There’s something wonderful about seeing “closed for the season” on a hotel’s website. They’re just four words, but they say so much: we don’t wring every penny from this property; this location has a “season;” this hotel values your experience far too much to stay open during sub-par weather. “Closed for the season” has a lot of sexy indifference to it; it makes you want to visit even more.

Sure, game-play conditions may vary, and a maintained court is more enticing for actual play, but as purely aesthetic fascinations, the inherently satisfying rationality of court design endures.