Chapter 3 — Choosing the Dream 🎾 After that first school tennis tour, something inside me changed. I came home different. I had seen what tennis could become. I had felt the excitement of competing, travelling, representing myself, and stepping onto courts away from home. Instead of making me satisfied, it made me want more. I wanted to work harder. I wanted to see how far I could really take this dream. But at that point, tennis wasn’t the only thing I was good at. I was also swimming. And somehow, I was good at both. I loved the feeling of being in the water just as much as I loved being on the tennis court. I was competing, improving and getting better in both sports, and for a while, I thought maybe I could do both. But eventually, I knew I had to make a choice. I couldn’t give everything to two dreams at the same time. If I wanted to find out what I was truly capable of, I had to choose one. And I chose tennis. 🎾 I chose the racket. I chose the court. I chose the dream that had started when I was just a little girl hitting a ball with my dad. And choosing tennis meant that my life started changing. Tennis tournaments weren’t always on weekends that fitted perfectly into a normal school schedule. Sometimes I had to travel. Sometimes I would spend an entire weekend competing and then come home exhausted, knowing that schoolwork was waiting for me. I remember the late nights. I remember Sundays when most kids were getting ready for the week ahead, relaxing with their families or getting ready for Monday morning. I was sitting with my mom, trying to catch up on everything I had missed. Assignments. Schoolwork. Notes. Everything. Sometimes we’d be sitting there late into the night, trying to finish as much as possible before Monday. And I remember thinking: “How am I going to do all of this and still chase my dream?” That’s when we started realizing that if I was truly going to take tennis seriously, something had to change. So we made one of the biggest decisions of my childhood. I started homeschooling. It wasn’t because I didn’t like school. It wasn’t because I wanted an easier life. It was because I wanted to give myself a chance to see what I could become. Homeschooling meant I could travel for tournaments, train more, recover properly and still keep up with my education. But there was another side to that decision that people didn’t always see. I was scared. I was scared of losing the memories I was supposed to be making. I was scared of missing birthdays. School events. Laughing with friends during breaks. Random conversations in the hallway. The little things that you don’t realize are special until you aren’t there anymore. I wondered if my friends would continue making memories without me. I wondered if I would miss out on the years everyone talks about when they’re older. There were moments when I looked at the life I was leaving behind and thought: “Am I really ready to give this up?” Because choosing a dream sounds beautiful when you say it out loud. But nobody tells you how difficult it can be to choose it. Sometimes chasing your dream means saying no to things you love. Sometimes it means watching other people live the life you thought you would have. And sometimes it means growing up a little earlier than everyone else. But every time I stepped onto that tennis court, I remembered why I had chosen this. I remembered the little girl who first picked up a racket. I remembered my dad. I remembered the dream. And slowly, I stopped seeing the sacrifices as things I was losing. I started seeing them as things I was investing. My childhood wasn’t disappearing. It was becoming part of my story. Every late-night school catch-up. Every early morning training session. Every weekend tournament. Every missed event. Every goodbye to friends. Every kilometre travelled. Every time I chose the tennis court when it would have been easier to choose something else. It was all building something. I didn’t know where tennis would take me yet. I didn’t know about the countries I would eventually travel to. I didn’t know about representing South Africa. I didn’t know about the big tournaments, the rankings, the wins, the losses, the heartbreaks or the moments that would completely change my life. I only knew one thing. I had a dream. And I was willing to work for it. **I had chosen tennis. And from that moment on, I wasn’t just playing tennis anymore. I was chasing a life I had dreamed about since I was a little girl.🎾❤️ And this was only the beginning…