What Is
Best of Ten?

The Long Version

Best of Ten started as your typical “husband loves a sport, wife tolerates it because husband loves it” kind of thing. Then, as the sports schedule started controlling the TV, the wife began to engage simply out of boredom. Before she knew it she’s following the WAGs on tour, picking her top 5 players, and boom, she’s invested. 

Three years later, during “tennis winter” (the only true tennis “off-season”), Charlie and I were craving those 6am European-swing tennis matches with our freshly brewed coffee, and we thought: what if we traveled to all of the ATP & WTA 1000 tournaments and grand slams? At that moment, Best of Ten was born.

What started as a love for tennis became an exciting opportunity for adventure. How cool would it be to see the world through the lens of a pro tennis player? Breaking that down even further, we were reminded that traveling to tennis tournaments doesn't pay the bills – it actually creates more of them. This wasn't going to be a one, two, or even three-year challenge. Just like a grand slam final tiebreak, this would be a race to ten with one goal in mind: document each and every moment for other people in the world interested in what it takes, or what it means, to go to tennis tournaments.

As we began our journey, it was simple fun. We were living in Miami at the time, so we started with the Miami Open. Then, we moved to New York, and the US Open was our next stop. Before we knew it, we were a few tournaments in, and although watching tennis was always exciting, the challenge to make it the best experience –– and worth our time and dollars –– mattered. 

Attending tennis tournaments became the same thing, with one key difference. There was no playbook. There wasn’t anyone online honestly telling us how to prepare for each tournament, outside of what you could find on an official tournament website, which was just essential to make sure you could get through the gates. There was no one telling us what the weather is actually like onsite (ex: Wimbledon can be a wild card –– one minute it’s 100°F and the next it’s freezing and raining), how do people dress, what kind of food can you expect, where to buy tickets, which stadiums are worth it and which aren’t, what the best way to get there is, and a laundry list of other tournament-specific details to know. 

If anything, your number one guides are probably the WAGs or tennis influencers on Instagram or other socials. That’s a fun and entertaining way to see the tournaments from a different perspective, but it’s not our reality –– the tennis spectator without the press pass, credential, or $1,000+ ticket.

That’s when we decided to document our tournament experiences as your official guides. We would dump every last bit of information, tips, and tricks we could gather in the hopes that the next person traveling across the world to a tournament for the first time would have every insight they needed for it to be great. 

So if you’re looking for tennis advice from people with access or connections, you’re looking in the wrong place. Similarly, if you’re looking for some cool, flashy bloggers flittering around tournament grounds, you won’t get that either. Each time we attend a tournament, our goal is to fail, and fail hard. That way, when you travel halfway around the world to go to the Australian Open, you can make the Best of Ten-thousand miles.