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Rebecca Marino

Marino takes inspirational step back from tennis

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Rebecca Marino steps away from tennis for a second time.

By Melissa Boyd

Former world no. 38 Rebecca Marino announced last week that she is stepping away from tennis for the second time in a year. The 22-year-old Canadian revealed that she has been dealing with depression for the past six years and was also a victim of cyber bullying. She felt this to be the best time to move on with the next chapter of her life without completely leaving tennis behind.
“I’m looking at other endeavours at this point. I would like to go to school, seek a job that sort of stuff, but I am very careful not to use the word retiring because I don’t feel it very appropriate because tennis will still be a very big part of my life,” Marino said.
While Marino openly discussed her struggles, she made it clear that depression and cyber bullying were not the reasons behind her decision to leave the sport.
“Social media has also taken its toll on me, it’s not the main reason I’m stepping back neither is the depression. Those are just two parts of my life that I would like to bring awareness to and wipe the slate clean in a sense so that it’s all out in the open. The reason I am stepping back is just because I don’t think I am willing to sacrifice my happiness and other parts of my life to tennis,” Marino explained.
Marino’s rise to the upper echelon of the women’s game was a rapid one, and somewhat unexpected given that she was a late bloomer. The native of Vancouver, British Columbia began playing tennis at the age of 10. At 17, Marino spent half a year in Switzerland and at 19, she moved from Vancouver to Montreal to train at Tennis Canada’s National Tennis Centre which is where her career took off. Marino enjoyed a breakthrough season in 2011 that saw her reach her first WTA final in Memphis and the third round at Roland-Garros. She posted two Top 20 wins over Marion Bartoli and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, played a memorable match against Venus Williams on Arthur Ashe Stadium at the U.S. Open, and also won three consecutive Challenger titles during the Fall indoor hard court season in 2010.
Regardless of how much success she enjoyed on the court, Marino’s most inspirational moment came last week when she revealed the details of her battle with a disease that so many are afraid to talk about. She became a hero in the eyes of many, especially those who are also struggling with depression and cyber bullying. Over the past week, Marino has done countless interviews and been approached by the likes of Canadian Olympic legend Clara Hughes who also suffers from depression.  Her courage in coming forward will not only change her life, but also the lives of so many others.
“I’d like to get rid of the stigma attached to depression and mental illnesses in the public and in professional sports,” Marino said. “Depression is nothing to be ashamed of. If I can open up about my struggle to the public, I hope I can give someone the courage to seek the help they deserve.”
Marino had a great run in tennis, one that should be celebrated and not remembered with the premise of what could have been.

The Tennis and Twitter Connection

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Eugenie Bouchard and Laura Robson’s Gangnam Style took social media by storm in October.

Rebecca Marino announced on Wednesday that she was stepping away from her tennis career, perhaps for good. The Canadian’s ranking had slipped to outside the top 400 after returning from a seven-month absence, but she appeared to be approaching 2013 with a fresh mentality. A few days earlier, the former World No. 38 spoke candidly to The New York Times about the effect that online abuse had on her decision to take a break from tennis. Following her second announcement, Marino held a conference call where she also spoke openly about her struggles with depression.
While Marino made it clear that she had been suffering from depression for the better part of six years and sought help during her sabbatical last year, her story is one of many in the shark tank that is a tennis player’s relationship with social media as a whole.
Tennis has a large online following which far outweighs its characterization as a ‘niche sport.’ The rise of social media over the better part of the past five years has allowed fans access to a player’s inner circle. First, players posted exclusive content on their websites and next came personal pictures and stories on their official Facebook pages. Both of these could be monitored by a third party, but Twitter added another dimension; it allowed fans to theoretically interact directly with players. As tennis players travel the world week in and week out, their fans get a chance to see the world as they do.
Teen sensations Laura Robson and Eugenie Bouchard, who are both avid tweeters, took the social networking site by storm in October when they released their version of the popular ‘Gangnam Style’ dance craze featuring cameos by Heather Watson, Maria Sharapova, Samantha Stosur, Fernando Verdasco, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and the WTA physio team. It may have never crossed their minds to create this gem of the Internet, nor may it have been available for fans if it weren’t for sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

With all the good, however, comes the bad.
As one would imagine, not all of this fan interaction is positive. There is perhaps an unwritten rule in the tennis-tweeting community to ‘never @ the player you’re speaking negatively of,’ but if players really wanted to find negative comments written about them, Twitter makes it all too easy for them to do so. Not only can players scroll through their mentions to read tweets directly composed to them, they can search their surname to find all tweets of which they are the subject.
Following Robson’s three-set loss to Yulia Putintseva in Dubai on Monday, she received her fair share of the abuse that has unfortunately become infamous on the social networking site. Some of the negative comments may have led to the Brit briefly deactivating her account; however, she reinstated it less than a day later. As Marino confirmed to The New York Times, much of the abuse comes from disgruntled bettors who lost money betting on a match. The majority of these comments are not even constructive in nature; they are hateful, personal attacks laced with profanity.
To avoid all of this, some players don’t even manage their own accounts, or merely hook it up to tweet links from their Facebook pages; setups like this provide little or no fan interaction. Other players who enjoy interacting with their fans, such as Paul-Henri Mathieu, have tried their best to take a stand.


While there is much more to Rebecca Marino’s story than just online abuse, it shows that at the end of the day, no one really knows much about the majority of the people he or she is interacting with online. The power of anonymity on the Internet is an incredible thing; no one really knows how overly abusive or negative comments, coupled with whatever else a player is dealing with, can affect them.


Just because an athlete is in the public eye doesn’t mean he or she should be treated with any less respect; many smartphones have the capability to sync with Twitter, so the vitriol and abuse, along with the praise and support, is as close as a player’s back pocket. Repeated encounters with this would no doubt have an effect on just about everyone.

Hopes are High for Canadians Down Under

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Milos Raonic
Milos Raonic leads the Canadian charge in Oz

Four Canadians will be part of the main draw of the Australian Open in Melbourne. Not only are they competing in the first Grand Slam of the new tennis season, but they also have aspirations of winning a few rounds and ultimately getting a shot at a spot in the second week Down Under.
After reaching the Round of 16 at the Australian Open last year, his best Grand Slam result, world no. 25 Milos Raonic is being labelled a dark horse by the experts for the title in 2012. Fresh off his second ATP World Tour title in Chennai two weeks ago, a run which included two Top 10 wins over Nicolas Almagro and Janko Tipsarevic, Raonic is poised to make another splash in Melbourne. His draw did him no favours however, as he finds himself on a potential collision course with Andy Roddick in the third round and defending champion Novak Djokovic in the fourth round. Raonic will begin his Australian Open campaign on Tuesday against crafty lefty Filippo Volandri. It will be the first meeting between the two players.
On the ladies side, one year removed from a heartbreaking loss in the second round to Francesca Schiavone that finished 9-7 in the third set, Rebecca Marino returns to Melbourne a different player and ready to overcome that second round hurdle this time around. The 21-year-old will start on Tuesday against Hungarian Greta Arn. Should Marino get through that match, she would face a tough test going up against either seventeenth seed Dominika Cibulkova or Magdalena Rybarikova, who defeated her in the final at Memphis last March.
Stéphanie Dubois is back after a stress fracture in her foot put a premature end to her 2011 season. She is appearing in her fourth consecutive Australian Open main draw and is hoping to pick up her first victory when she meets Russia’s Elena Vesnina in the opening round on Tuesday. Aleksandra Wozniak rounds out the Canadian singles contingent Down Under. 2012 is a big year for Wozniak as she tries to regain her 2009 form when she reached a career-high of no. 21 on the WTA rankings. She earned a spot in the main draw following the withdrawal of Timea Bacsinszky and surprisingly, is still winless in main draw matches in Melbourne. Just getting over a bout with bronchitis, Wozniak will open on Tuesday against Shuai Zhang of China.
Australia has not been very kind to Canadians in recent years in terms of tennis results, but be on the lookout for some Canadian flags on the scoreboard during the later rounds, they certainly won’t be there by chance.