just dive it
a bite-size take on tennis athlete, alexandra eala and the art of a scrappy win
Hi friend,
There are opportunities that come to you, there are opportunities you find, but the best opportunities are the ones you have to dive for.
As much as we talk about the NFL and NBA here, I wanted to share a moment in tennis that really stood out to me lately from a 21 year old athlete, Alexandra Eala who just played at Wimbledon, the biggest tournament in tennis. She went into her match as a massive underdog against Iga Swiatek, a 2025 Wimbledon champion.
In case you don’t know Alex, she actually grew up in a basketball-dominant country, practicing after school on public courts in the Philippines with her grandpa. More basketballs bounce on neighborhood courts there in a day than tennis balls do in a month. She recently talked about how she used to show up to those practices as a little kid with chubby cheeks, ruffled socks, and light-up sneakers. There were no true grass courts to practice on back then. Instead, she spent her childhood playing on hard pavement that was built for basketball, adjusting her game around hoops hanging over her head.
On paper, a kid from a country without a major tennis history is not supposed to beat the best player in the world on Centre Court. But paper does not account for how bad someone wants it.
She didn’t just compete. She played with total, raw hunger, using her entire body in every sprint and sliding across the grass to stay in the game. She ended up pulling off a massive victory, becoming the first player from her country to ever make it this far in the tournament.
@wimbledon
It was a powerful reminder that sometimes you are not just doing it for yourself. When you step out there, you are representing an entire country of possibility. You’re paving a path for the young girls who will come after you, showing them what is possible all because you had the courage to try.
Watching her out there reminded me that sometimes we get so comfortable calculating our chances and waiting for perfectly safe conditions before we make a move.
Alex didn’t wait for a guaranteed victory. She made a difference because she was willing to dive for the ball, risk looking messy, and leave absolutely everything on the court.
The scrappiest wins are often the games people leave a bookmark on when referencing important, historic moments in your career.
It made me think about why I show up to [solidcore] every week. If you’ve ever taken a class, you know how brutal low-impact, high-intensity workouts can be. Except in that studio, the competition isn’t out on a field. It is entirely in your own mind, playing out against yourself.
Your muscles literally shake and those small movements become ways to get stronger. But I keep going back because it challenges my mind just as much as my body. In that studio, hitting muscle failure is not a sign of weakness, it is the mechanism required for growth. You have to break the muscle down to build it back stronger.
It’s a weekly practice in being scrappy and just showing up when things feel hard, because the win is in the quiet work as much as it is out on the field.
Regardless of what happens at the end of Wimbledon, you don’t need to win the final round to leave a permanent mark.
I hope this is a reminder that the magic is not just about holding a trophy at the end of the line. The magic is in being the type of person who refuses to leave the court with any regret whether you win or lose.
So as we head into this week, look at the things you’re building and don’t just wait for the easy path to open up.
Sometimes you have to play scrappy, put on your ruffled socks, lace up your light-up sneakers, and just dive it.
