Author: nhagberg

  This summer at TLC, we will have instructors from twelve different countries. And every one of them speaks tennis.   We will have many different world religions and non-religions represented on our staff and in our campers.   Muslims, Christians, agnostics, Jews, Hindus, atheists, Buddhists. And everyone speaks tennis.   We will have different political…

I have a confession to make. I really dislike Nextdoor. For those of you who don’t know, it is a network for neighbors to connect with each other via an email group. I think it was started with good intentions about how we can get to know each other, support each other in our neighborhoods,…

Hi Tennis and Life Friends, Tennis & Life Camps is thrilled and grateful to announce the receipt of a $1,000,000 gift from Boy and Betty Toy, longtime TLC supporters.  The gift honors the work of the TLC summer staff for going above and beyond the duties of a regular job and acknowledges the impact summer…

No Podemos hacer todo, pero podemos hacer algo. I’m learning Spanish! I wish I had learned it when I was young. But I didn’t. Now I’m forty years older than when I learned Japanese in college. I am committed to being fluent in five years. We’ll see how my brain cells hold up. My wife…

I think about it a lot. I believe you do, too. At the bottom of it all, of the rage, the sadness, the uncertainty, I believe is a fear in us all. Why can’t we seem to get it right? The world is divided. We cannot seem to break out of our fear of the…

What if, when you sit around the Thanksgiving table today, or wherever you sit, you take one Gratitude Minute together in silence, and think about all the things you’re grateful for. Not a meditation, not a prayer, just let your mind be a movie reel and let all the things you are grateful for wash…

I showed up at my first ever tennis tournament (other than the local Fiesta Days small town tournament where I grew up playing on asphalt courts and was perennial champion in our approximately three-person draw).  I was 14.  I had only been playing tennis for two year, but I was spending six hours a day…

This past summer I said the words out loud to campers for the first time and found them hard to believe: “This is my 40th summer at TLC, 13th as director.”  How is it possible I have been here 40 years when I made it clear I was only intending to stay one?  Part of…

The three TLC supervisors sat down across from me at the coffee shop almost ten years ago at the end of a TLC summer. Liz. Jordan. Angie. I had been director for about three years. Liz (now our Assistant Director of Tennis Programming, then a TLC Supervisor), began calmly. “Women are not being treated the…

When I am upset, sometimes I say something like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” When I am really upset, I may say something like, “Oh, for (a different four-letter word than “Pete”’s) sake!” But what would happen if I spent more time focusing on another word? This is gleaned from a February 15 ESPN article. Last week,…