I’m Pretty Sure I Could Beat My 16-year-old Self

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya on tennis, discipline, & learning to trust your instincts

It was a balm and a joy to chat with Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, brilliant writer of haunted fictions and tennis star. This is the second in a series of interviews with writers who are also athletes, exploring the relationship between sports and creative practices. Here is a little more about Kayla:

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture + literary criticism living in Orlando. She is the author of the queer horror novelette Helen House (Burrow Press), the managing editor of Autostraddle, and an assistant fiction editor at Foglifter. Her work is featured in the 2025 Dzanc Books anthology Be Gay, Do Crimes.

I also love Kayla’s essays on tennis: here’s one in Autostraddle (on aging and tennis) and here’s another in LitHub (on competition in sports and writing).

I feel like I know a little bit about your relationship with tennis: that you played seriously when you were younger, took some time away, and then returned to the sport somewhat recently. I’d love to learn more about how your relationship with tennis has evolved over time, and what the sport means to you.

Wow, where do I even begin?! I suppose at the literal beginning of my life. Tennis has been a part of my life since before I was born. My parents met because of tennis. Some of my earliest memories revolve around tennis. I learned how to play at a young age, and while my parents also had me participate in a bunch of sports, tennis was always my favorite. I played varsity and had a complicated relationship to it, mainly because adults in my life (not my parents) kept making me feel like I needed to choose between my passions/interests (namely: tennis vs. the arts), and it made me resentful and frustrated. I also had a horrible coach in high school. I’ve been reflecting on this a lot recently, but I think he was a huge part of why I stopped playing after graduation.

I was never good enough to play for D1 or anything like that. Any of the schools I was interested in attending had too good of tennis programs, even at the club level. And while I’d played since a young age and had taken all sorts of private lessons and things like that, I was a pretty scrappy player. My technique wasn’t perfect. It still isn’t! I’ve cleaned it up a lot, but I don’t really consider myself a technical player. So it’s not like I was going to play at a highly competitive level after high school, and maybe I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder about that so chose not to play at all. But I also think if I’d had a better and more supportive coach in high school that I may have kept playing in a casual way.

I don’t want to give the terrible coach more space than he deserves, but I did want to pause on coaching as its own art. Since I started competing I’ve worked closely with two coaches: they’re very different but both really great. Tough but not in a way that makes you feel defeated. Being in the presence of good coaching has also taught me a lot about teaching and mentoring. What makes for a good coach, do you think?

You know, I think I’m still searching for my ideal tennis coach. The best coach in general I’ve ever worked with is my strength coach, who is also a writer, so it’s nice to have someone to relate to on that level, too. I have some decent tennis coaches I’ve worked with since my return, but I’ve also worked with some men who just immediately were condescending about my goals. One said to me “it’s not like you’re going to join the tour.” I know that! I’m not delusional! I want to be the best that I can be at the competition level I fit into! I take amateur competition very seriously!

The one coach I met who matched my freak so to speak…vanished? This sounds so bizarre and made up, but he literally ghosted one day and then suddenly didn’t work at the facilities where I was seeing him. I still don’t really know what happened. But he was a good coach because he was tough, intense, and encouraged my fire instead of trying to dampen it. When I said I wanted to add power to my serve, he took me seriously. I’d had other coaches questioning why I needed a power serve at this point of my game.

I feel really called to coaching myself in the way I feel called to teaching writing. I think because I’ve been dealing with bad men as coaches since my teens, I just really want to be something different and better for women learning the sport. I don’t officially coach or anything, but I have met women who are learning tennis in their forties for the first time, and when I hit with them and give them advice, so much of it ends up being about confidence and the mental game. Sure, I can fix their grip and run volley drills with them all day, but that mental stuff is so important and often what they’re not getting from pros at the clubs. I’m like what can we work on about your confidence and sense of self off the court that can help you on it?

And that’s something I bring to my approach in teaching writing, too, which I mostly do in pretty informal settings rather than traditional academia. In a workshop I’m teaching now, I talk so much about how to learn to trust your instincts and doing work off the page to strengthen your voice and your confidence in talking about your own work and submitting places. I’ve made a career out of writing gay essays for the internet. That took a lot of off-the-page work!

I mean I guess this whole interview is just solidifying my desire to coach tennis one day. I’d love to specialize in working with adult women new to the sport or returning players who took long breaks like me. If someone can figure out how to make tennis-coach-writing-teacher a hybrid job, call me.

Hard agree that good coaching attends to both the technical side and the mental game (which is huge in boxing too). And I love the idea of helping both tennis players and writers learn to trust their own instincts. How did you find your way back to tennis as an adult?

I dabbled with trying to dive back into tennis throughout my twenties, but it was never the right time. Then all of a sudden, it was. Quite literally overnight in the spring of 2024 at 32-years-old, I went from not playing at all to playing four or five times a week.

During my decade+ away from the sport, I was still a huge tennis fan. Everyone in my family is. I grew up in a house divided between Federer/Nadal fans (I was Team Federer). My dad texts me during the finals of every major tournament without fail. He would have loved to be a Richard Williams for my sister and I if we’d been more dedicated to tennis growing up.

My dad was visiting me in Florida in 2024, and we went on a walk around a lake. There was a bulletin board with a bunch of fliers on it, and one of them advertised drop-in tennis clinics. My dad told me to take a picture in case I was interested in starting up again, so I did, but I didn’t think much of it. Then just a few days later, I was running on the treadmill at the gym and hating it. I loathe cardio without a point, which is to say I loathe cardio without competition. I was still on the treadmill when I pulled up the picture of the tennis flier. I called the number on it from my car on the drive home, and I was in a clinic two days later. Within six weeks, I’d joined two leagues.

I do often get caught up thinking about What Ifs when it comes to tennis and my past. But I have to push that and just focus on where my game is at now. And to be honest, I’m pretty sure I could beat my 16-year-old self. Unless she coasted by on pure endurance. She’ll always have that on me.

In your LitHub essay about tennis, you write: “The two hours I spend playing tennis in the morning does not take two hours away from writing; it makes it so that when I sit down to write another time, I’m more ready for it, more present and fueled. Playing tennis has created an abundance of energy in my life, not a scarcity of it.” Can you talk a little more about how you feel like tennis has influenced your writing practice, and vice versa?

Discipline is one of the biggest driving factors in my life. I don’t only consider myself a pretty disciplined person; I crave discipline. It’s definitely how I was able to be a full-time freelancer for the first seven years of my career after college.

Discipline serves me well in both tennis and writing but I’ve also learned to channel different energies and approaches to discipline into each. For example, I’m not a word count goal writer. This took me way too long to figure out — I think because on paper, I should absolutely be a word count goal writer! I love concrete goals! I love measurable progress! It doesn’t get more straightforward than setting a daily word count and trying to reach that.

But it just…doesn’t work for me! And in some cases has been counterproductive. If I told myself I was going to write X words for X amount of days and then did not achieve that, it made me stop writing altogether. Or if I felt like I didn’t have time to write X words I would just not write any at all instead of just doing my best to write as much as I could.

Oof I relate to all this. I crave discipline too. I mean, yes, sometimes I’m tired and don’t feel like training, but in general the discipline piece comes naturally to me. After my last fight I was like maybe I’ll just take it easy for a week or two and I hated it lol. But also this hunger for discipline has led to big time burnout in the past. Can you talk a little more about how you’re approaching discipline differently these days?

“Doing your best” is a concept we often hear in competitive sports and in strength training, which I also do in service of my overall tennis game. But for some reason with writing, I was always holding myself to a standard of perfection that is hard to live up to and can have diminishing returns.

With my return to tennis came a lot of specific goals for myself. I wanted to reach a certain USTA rating by a certain time. I go into most matches with specific goals for myself that are more granular than just “win.” I’ll usually want to hold my serve and serve a couple aces, for example. I don’t beat myself up when I don’t achieve these goals, but I do look at why I didn’t and how I can improve for the future.

Totally. I feel like each fight I want to perform to the best of my ability. It really is more about progress, about knowing I gave those rounds everything. Whereas with writing I am deeply wildly ambitious. I want to write great books, full stop. With boxing I started in my mid-30s and was never much of an athlete before then, and it’s been really beneficial to make a serious commitment to a sport where I have meaningful goals but not major ambitions (i.e. I am not going to the Olympics). I actually think boxing helped me to fall in love with the process again. I’m more patient with myself at the desk.

Getting this part of my achievement-obsessed psyche out on the court has freed me tremendously when it comes to writing. I don’t set word count goals for myself anymore, because I’ve realized it doesn’t work for me, and because that itch I do have to set a numbers-based goal can be scratched by tennis.

There are so many other examples like this. My tennis game and my creative life are each constantly teaching me things about the other. I’m at a writing residency right now, and one of the first things I did was figure out where I could play tennis. I’m not the type of writer who needs to enter a cave to write. The most beneficial residencies for me are always going to be the kind where I can still play tennis, lift, and interact with other people.

I feel like tennis is a bit like boxing in that you play against another person vs. playing on a team (though maybe doubles is a bit like a team?) so there is the drama of a stylistic / technical clash between two people. And also the understanding that no one can help you on the court but you. What is the tennis community like? Do you practice with a team? Or is the work more solitary?

I feel so similarly about the tennis community as I do about the writing community. No one can play my match but myself (I somewhat reluctantly play doubles, but singles is my real love), and no one can write my novel but myself. But I couldn’t do any of it without the people I surround myself with. I may not have found my perfect coaching fit yet, but I have so many hitting partners and people in my corner when it comes to tennis, and they not only make me a better player but have also just opened up my world so much. I play tennis in the suburbs of central Florida. I’m a brown, childless lesbian who works in the arts and I play with a bunch of straight white moms in a much different tax bracket who I never would have really come into contact with if not for tennis. And that has been really rewarding! I get them to read my wife’s gay books! And we also just connect deeply about the sport, which leads to us connecting deeply about other things, too. My team captains from the two different teams I played on in the past year are incredible women, and one has become a very close friend. This has also allowed me to put my own roots down in Orlando, where I live, where previously the only friends I really had I knew through my wife who’s from here. My tennis community has become my Florida community, too — or, at least, a meaningful extension of it.

There are some lone wolves in tennis who stick to things like “flex leagues” where you’re competing by yourself without a team, and I much prefer having a team, even just for the post-match drinks and recaps. But I love that I get both things: friendship and community but also a chance to tune out the rest of the world and just be totally present and alone on the court during a match.

And that’s the writing community for me, too. I can’t write without other writers in my life ultimately. I mentioned the residency I’m at right now, and in addition to working in tennis to my daily routine, I’ve been spending time with writers who I really admire and who I’m lucky to consider friends. It’s nice, of course, to sit down at my desk and tune out the rest of the world, but I’m still kind of always carrying these people with me.

Last question! Do you have any superstitions before a match? I always eat the same pre-sparring snack and wear my lucky shorts.

Funnily enough, I have WAY more superstitions now than I did as a teen. My pre-match ritual is just longer in general and usually starts about two hours before I have to leave the house for a match, which means it’s often happening before the sun is up. A lot of this is essential, like what I eat for breakfast, stretching, braiding my hair, sunscreen etc. As far as pure superstitions go, I have to kiss my cat Timmy Tomato’s head and take a pre-match selfie before I leave the house. I have to drive to every match with the sunroof open, no matter the temperature. I have to wear my visor from The Lynx, our buddy Lauren Groff’s bookstore in Gainesville! If something happens to that visor, I don’t know what I’ll do.

I’m super particular about the music I listen to on the drive to a match. For a while, BRAT was my pre-match soundtrack every time. Eventually though, I wanted to change this, so I invented a whole playlist transition ritual where I started the album but by the end of the first track “360” I switched it to “Thank U, Next” by Ariana Grande and then had an Ariana-only playlist for a while. I then transitioned that to a custom playlist I made and had to play off the Ariana era by listening to her song “Bye.” I’m still on that custom playlist, which has a little bit of everything, truly: Kendrick, Peaches, Portishead, Doechii. I’ll keep that playlist until it’s no longer serving me and then transition to something else!