Access Is a Chance
Last Saturday, I watched the women’s final of the French Open, the match where 21-year-old tennis star Coco Gauff beat the more experienced Aryna Sabalenka. I was watching this match for two reasons:
- My daughter is in her second year of tennis, having played two seasons for her school and now attending summer tennis camp.
- I used to enjoy watching tennis as a kiddo in my dad’s apartment with the window unit AC blowing ice-cold air. I loved watching tennis also because it was a quieter, calming sport that relaxed and excited me in the most inward ways.
To the surprise of my kiddo and partner, they couldn’t believe it when I reeled off players like Agassi, Sampras, Roddick, Sharapova, Nadal, and others. At one point, my partner asked me why I never got into tennis, but what she meant was why I had never played. She wasn’t wrong. I had never even stepped foot on a tennis court, much less played a match.
My explanation was simple: I did not know tennis was accessible to me. To me, tennis existed in a far-off place within the confines of a boxed television, played by people who looked different than me. It didn’t dawn on me that you could buy a racket at your local sporting goods store, then visit a park with a tennis court and sit there for hours playing the wall if you didn’t have a partner. No one told 8-year-old me this or put a racket in my hand.
I don’t want to make it seem like I lived a poor, sheltered life. I played little league baseball for several years and played lots of basketball with my neighborhood friends, either at parks, my goal, or their goals.
Today, I’m excited to learn the game and am confident I can pick it up pretty quickly to a level where I can get some great exercise and actually play decently against some other adult enthusiasts around town. But had I been granted access as a kid, you might have watched me compete over the weekend.
And that’s the beauty of access. It’s what people will do with it. Some have all the access in the world and squander it. And some will cherish even access to the smallest of resources, growing a humility that outweighs privilege.
Much is the same with technology, especially tools like AI. When people, especially people less privileged or underrepresented, have access to the same education and tools, we level the playing field, or in this case the court, and give ourselves more chances to witness the greatness people can achieve, or squander, when given a chance.
Access is essentially a chance. And we all deserve one.