The journey to a tennis away match begins long before the team of four squeezes into the AU Sports minibus. It starts in the early morning training sessions, when the walk to practice is so dark the line between 9pm or 7am starts to blur.

Played over a net and scored like tennis, in an enclosed court like squash and with tactics as intricate as chess, Real tennis feels familiar yet intriguingly unusual. It’s the original form of the game from which lawn tennis emerged in the nineteenth century.

In sports, athletes often have an idol, coach, or mentor that they look up to. For Tony Kavalam, a final-year geology student and ultimate frisbee player, that person is Jimmy Chu.