Peaks and Volleys

At a plush Bahamas resort, rookie tennis player Brittani Sonnenberg goes head-to-head with some of the sport's greatest champions.

- Baha Mar Cup

BOARDING MY FLIGHT to the Bahamas, I discreetly scanned the other passengers, trying to tell if anyone else was bound for a tennis tournament and lessons at Baha Mar. I registered a gaggle of already-tipsy girlfriends, a retired couple clutching hands tightly, and a foursome who looked athletic but held purses and backpacks, not rackets.

My stomach tightened. As a kid, I attended basketball or soccer camp in Atlanta every summeran experience that left me keenly aware of my outsider status (my family lived in Singapore and China during the school year). Back then, I at least had my sister by my side. Now, a newly minted tennis journalist invited to cover a tournament at Baha Mar, I felt awkwardly alone. I was also newly married; this would be my first solo trip since moving in with Alejandro, a Venezuelan writer who shared my love of food, books, and travel. "Sometimes you have to relearn how to be by yourself," my therapist had said when I confessed my qualms.

At summer camp in Atlanta, my sister and I would be met by a coach who would bark out our last names and assign us to a spartan dorm room. But at the Rosewood Baha Mar, a beaming receptionist greeted me like I was Serena Williams and handed me a perfectly balanced gin cocktail. When I stepped into my ocean-view room on the seventh floor, any residual unease melted into giddy joy. The décor was an ode to the island, from the cane-and-hemp chairs to the cloudlike bedding. Through the windows, I could see the hotel grounds, an explosion of palm trees, and the sea, which glittered an exquisite cerulean. I wasn't just on a tennis trip, I realized. I was on a honeymoon with myself.