Is tennis the only sport that you can't be a professional even if you're athletic without your parents giving you significant help from an early age?

[RomanEmperor]

I've read that if you don't start tennis before you're 10 then the odds of you being a pro are EXTREMELY low, and even if you're a great athlete and start as a teenager the best you can hope for is maybe to be a college-level player. That's sort of lame since you need to play and be coached from a really young age to be great at it.

[Penyair]

No. I used to professionally weight lift and also do triathlons. I don't do them anymore due to my health. But you can self train in many sports. Other sports are just offered by schools such as soccer, tennis, baseball, swimming, and track and field. Which is the reason I ended up being in them. I had to argue with my parents over martial arts at a young age and I also insisted on gymnastics/acrobatics when they wanted me to only focus on dance.

Though when I competed in sports. I saw kids in some very poor countries with determination. They had very little but they wanted to play and they wanted to be like the people they heard on radios or about in school. Some of them had to plead to be taken in to be trained or for people to sponsor them as their family had no money. Some of these kids started very late. But they made it in the end.

Many kids don't make it determination or not. So you just have to love it even if you don't win. I'm not saying that because I won medals I'm saying it because sometimes I didn't or my friends didn't. One of which had a really competitive parent that had to learn to let their kid be happy.

[RomanEmperor]

Like Olympic medals?

[Penyair]

If you mean the other kids and medals I think you can find a few stories online by using google. As for me I did win medals under a different name in another country. The medals were for local, regional, country and international. But that was a very long time ago (over 50 years ago) and I competed under another name for privacy reasons. I did coach gymnastics and dance. But didn't coach in the other areas I did things in. You get to a certain point where you can't do much more so if you want to still do something you switch sports or specialty within sports. An example is if you compete in track and field and swimming trying triathlon's. If you've done skiing you can switch to biathlon (shooting and skiing). Depending on the sport you can switch countries. When I did figure skating I ended up teaming up with someone from South America. Attending a foreign school can sometimes provide this exemption.

I left all of it behind because I was doing military service and was injured.

[April10]

All sports are like that

[RomanEmperor]

Eh not necessarily? You can just start running track in high school or something?