The first time a grown man screamed in my face on an American tennis court, the sky over North Carolina was so blue it hurt to look at.

“Are you a complete idiot?” Coach Swain roared, his voice echoing off the empty aluminum bleachers. A ball I’d just served sailed long, thudding uselessly against the green fence. “What was that?!”

Sweat stung my eyes. My ribs were already bruised from the last “demonstration” he’d given me.

He stalked toward me, visor crooked, whistle bouncing against his Gardner-Webb University T-shirt. Beyond the courts, the U.S. flag flapped over the athletic complex, the stripes snapping in the hot Southern air like it was all part of the show.

“This,” he shouted, snatching the ball from my hand, “is how you return a ball!”

He tossed it up and crushed it, the pop of contact as loud as the crack of a bat in a small-town baseball stadium. The ball screamed into the opposite corner.

“This is what you gotta do!” he yelled. “This is what you gotta do to get to the top!”

He stared at me like he could bulldoze talent into my bones by force. But all I could think was: if this is the top, why does it feel like falling?

Funny thing is, when your parents immigrate halfway around the world so you can have “a better life in America,” you don’t really picture that life including a red-faced coach calling you useless on a college court in the middle of nowhere.

But life rarely goes the way you script it in your head.

My name is Nicholas Ulehla. Son of immigrants from what used to be Czechoslovakia, born in Toronto, raised on highways and rental houses and the idea that if you work hard enough, everything will make sense.

It took me a long time to realize that sometimes doing good means walking away from the plan everyone else has for you.

When I was born, my mom leaned over the hospital blanket and whispered in Czech, “Vítej na světě, Niky. Welcome to the world.”

I didn’t stay in that world for very long.

My dad’s job—some mix of engineering and sales that involved airports and briefcases and a lot of phone calls late at night—meant our passports filled faster than our family photo albums. By the time I turned one, we’d already traded Toronto snow for American suburbs: strip malls, school buses, baseball fields, and the kind of light you only see over U.S. highways at sunset.

We moved so often that my childhood is a blur of different state license plates and different school cafeterias. Massachusetts for a year. Then Ohio. Then a short stint in Texas. Then the Carolinas. The inside of a U-Haul truck feels like home when you’re a kid who never fully finishes unpacking.

“Don’t get too attached,” Dad would say every time we loaded up again. “You make friends easy, Niky. You’ll make new ones.”

Except I didn’t. Not really.

By the time I figured out the social ecosystem of one middle school—who you could sit with at lunch, who you had to avoid, which teacher let you retake quizzes—we’d be packing boxes again. After a while, I stopped trying.

No point making friends I’d have to leave behind.

So I made friends with something I could carry everywhere: a racket.

Tennis started as an after-school activity. A way to keep me “out of trouble,” as my mom put it. We couldn’t always afford sports in the expensive clubs, but public parks in America had courts, and a bucket of balls cost less than daycare. My mom would feed me balls until the sun went down, her voice carrying across the faded asphalt in a mix of Czech and accented English.

“Again, Nicholas! Pěkný! Nice! Follow through!”

When I was twelve and we were living in a beige townhouse in a quiet North Carolina neighborhood, my parents sat me down at the laminate kitchen table and told me I’d be doing school online from now on.

“Homeschool,” Dad said. “It will give you more time. For tennis, for your future.”

I glanced at the laptop on the table with the online curriculum pulled up. The walls behind him were still bare; we hadn’t been there long enough to hang pictures.

“More time for your dreams,” Mom added, smiling.

The thing was, I hadn’t picked the dream. It had kind of grown around me while I wasn’t looking.

Tennis tournaments replaced school dances. Rankings replaced yearbook signatures. While kids my age were learning how to talk to girls in American malls, I was learning how to breathe through cramps on a court in the North Carolina humidity.

It wasn’t all bad. There’s something hypnotic about the rhythm of a rally, the way time shrinks to the rectangle of the court and the bright ball arcing between two people trying to break each other without actually touching.

My schedule turned into a loop: online school, tennis, sleep. School, tennis, sleep. Repeat until pro.

That was the plan.

If Dad was the reason we moved, Mom was the reason anything ever felt stable.

She was a small woman with sharp eyes and hands that never stopped moving. She spoke three languages and could make a pot of soup stretch three days. When Dad was on the road—nine times out of ten—it was just us: Mom and me against the world.

I was a mama’s boy. I admit it.

But that didn’t mean she wasn’t hard on me.

“Nicholas,” she scolded one afternoon, slapping a print-out of my math grade onto the table. “B? B?!” She switched to Czech automatically when she was upset. “Víš, jak důležité jsou známky? You know how important your grades are.”

“It’s one test,” I muttered.

“One test becomes a habit,” she said. “Do it right or don’t do it.”

She expected straight A’s. She expected tournament wins. She expected me to use the opportunities this country gave us. Her whole reason for leaving Europe was sitting in front of her fumbling algebra. It came with pressure.

But it also came with something else: that quiet, unwavering belief that I could do anything if I worked hard enough.

“If you do good,” she’d tell me, stirring something on the stove, “good will always come back to you.”

It sounded like the kind of thing you’d find on a motivational poster in a guidance counselor’s office, right next to a bald eagle and an American flag. But she believed it like gravity, so I did too.

The weird thing about isolation is it pushes you toward screens.

Without a school hallway to walk through or a cafeteria to hide in, I started spending more and more time on YouTube. Not just watching—learning.

How to cut footage. How to layer music. How to add captions that didn’t make you want to claw your eyes out.

YouTube became the friend that never moved away. People from all over the U.S.—Florida, California, Wisconsin—uploaded bits of their lives. It felt like being invited into a million different houses without having to pack a single box.

I started a tiny channel of my own, mostly to practice editing. Random clips. A few gaming highlights. No one watched them except a handful of friends from old clubs, but I loved the process: taking messy footage and carving a story out of it.

Still, tennis was the main thing. We drove all over the Southeast for tournaments, worn duffel bags in the trunk, motel keys on flimsy plastic tags in our pockets.

By senior year of high school, it looked like the sacrifice was paying off.

“We are so proud of you, Nick,” the director at my academy announced at the end-of-year banquet. We were in a fluorescent-lit room, folding chairs arranged in rows, parents in polos and sundresses clapping politely. “Seventh-ranked tennis player in the state, perfect 4.0 GPA, and a scholarship to play at Gardner-Webb University studying Computer Science.”

Mom squeezed my hand so hard my fingers went numb.

“You earned this, Nicholas,” she whispered. “You worked for this.”

She was right. I had worked for it. Only problem was, somewhere along the line, I’d forgotten to check if I actually wanted it.

College was supposed to be the payoff. Instead, it was where everything started to crack.

Gardner-Webb wasn’t some big-name program, but it was a real NCAA school in the American South with real matches, real travel, real expectations. When I first walked across campus, backpack slung over one shoulder, past kids tossing footballs and girls in sorority shirts taking pictures in front of the fountain, I thought: this is it. I finally get the normal American college experience.

That lasted, oh, about a week.

Tennis practices were brutal. Runs at dawn. Drills that went on until your shoulder felt like it belonged to someone else. Then lift. Then class. Then study hall.

The other guys on the team made it look easy. Their eyes lit up when they talked about the tour, about the pros, about maybe one day stepping onto a court in New York at the US Open.

My eyes lit up when I talked about… YouTube.

Instead of running extra miles, I was sneaking time to watch creators break down analytics, thumbnails, retention curves. Instead of dreaming about qualifying rounds, I was dreaming about collaborating with streamers whose handles were more familiar to me than my teammates’ last names.

I even landed a few small gigs editing for real channels. Gaming creators like KingRichard. A guy named SypherPK, whose Fortnite videos I’d watched religiously back in high school. The first time he said “Thanks, Nick, looks great” in a Discord call, it felt better than any trophy I’d ever hauled home.

The problem was, there are only so many hours in a day. And I was trying to live two lives.

Class, practice, editing, my own channel, sleep—something had to give. It started with school.

For the first time in my life, my grades slipped.

“Nicholas,” Coach said one afternoon, catching me after practice. His visor shaded his eyes, but I could feel them on me. “You got a sec?”

“Yeah,” I said, wiping sweat off my forehead.

He crossed his arms. “Is there something going on?” he asked. “You haven’t been playing as well, your grades are dropping. You can’t be successful if you keep going like this. Do you even want to play?”

I stared past him at the American flag over the stadium, the stars dim in the late afternoon, the stripes limp in the humid air.

“I don’t know,” I said. It was the truest thing I’d said out loud in months.

He frowned. “Figure it out,” he snapped. “Or someone else will take your spot.”

Lying to your parents from a dorm room three states away is a special kind of guilt.

“Hi, Niky!” Mom chirped over video chat, the lag making her smile jerky. The kitchen behind her was familiar and foreign at the same time. New fridge magnets, same old table.

“How’s university?” Dad asked, leaning in from out of frame.

“Good, good. Great,” I said.

That was a lie.

“Tennis?” Mom asked. “You winning?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Going well.”

That was an even bigger lie.

I didn’t know how to tell them that the thing they’d built my entire life around suddenly felt like someone else’s dream. That I was making a few hundred dollars a month editing videos and that it thrilled me more than any match.

So I didn’t. I lived a double life.

By day, I was the scholarship tennis guy, grinding through drills and pretending to care about ranking points. By night, I was hunched over my laptop in a tiny off-campus apartment, cutting highlight reels and uploading content, watching numbers tick in real time on a dashboard that felt more honest than the scoreboard on court.

Eventually, the double life broke.

It happened after another brutal loss, this time against a team we should’ve destroyed. I’d missed routine shots. My head had been somewhere else—thinking about a thumbnail, a hook, anything but the fuzzy yellow ball flying at my face.

Back in my dorm room, I sat on the edge of the bed, phone in my hand, heart hammering. I could hear my roommate in the bathroom, music playing under the shower.

My thumb hovered over Mom’s contact.

I hit call.

She picked up on the second ring. “Ahoj, Niky,” she said. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I just… wanted to talk.”

Of course that was the moment Dad walked into the kitchen on her end. I could hear the creak of the chair, the scrape of it against the tile.

I took a breath.

“I decided I don’t want to play tennis anymore,” I said. “And I don’t want to study Computer Science.”

Silence. Then my mom’s voice, sharp in Czech. “Co to znamená? What do you mean? You’ve been working toward this since you were a kid.”

“My heart’s just not in it anymore,” I said. “I want to be a YouTuber.”

I rushed the next part, before courage could vanish. “And before you say it’s a bad idea or there’s no money in it, I’ve already made some. Editing for other people. I’m going to go for it either way. Even if that means getting my own place.”

“Nicholas,” she said again, but this time her voice was different. Not angry. Just… surprised.

“I can’t waste time doing something I don’t love,” I said. “Not when I finally know what I do love.”

There was a long pause. I could hear the clock ticking on the wall of the kitchen back home, even across state lines.

“Okay,” she said finally. “It’s okay.”

My dad made a sound in the background like he’d swallowed a fork.

We ended up agreeing on a deal: a gap year. Twelve months. If, at the end of that year, I could support myself with YouTube and editing, I wouldn’t have to go back to college. If I couldn’t, I’d re-enroll. Tennis, degree, the whole thing.

It felt like jumping off a cliff with the promise that maybe, just maybe, there was a safety net below.

I had no idea the ground was going to shift in a completely different way.

I walked into our house a week later carrying a duffel bag and a guilty kind of excitement, expecting an argument.

Instead, I walked into a secret.

“I’m home!” I called, pushing the door open. The air smelled like something simmering on the stove, familiar and comforting. “Mom?”

“Nicholas!” Mom appeared in the hallway, moving slower than usual. Her clothes hung a little looser on her frame, but I didn’t clock it right away. I dropped my bag and hugged her.

“You’ve lost weight,” I said, pulling back. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said quickly. “Jsem v pořádku. I’m just happy you’re home.”

Dad came in from the backyard, face drawn. “My son,” he said, hugging me harder than usual. “The YouTube star.” His voice wobbled on the joke.

Something in the room felt… off. Like a painting hung slightly crooked.

Later, I overheard them in the kitchen, voices sharp in Czech that had nothing to do with my decision to leave school.

“How do you expect me to pay for all of this?” my dad demanded. “Léčba, chemotherapy, specialists—”

“I don’t care about the money,” Mom snapped. “I care that you are never here. Especially now.”

“Nikdy nejsi doma,” she said. “You’re always on the road for work. It’s just us.”

My stomach dropped.

When I confronted her, she tried to brush it off. “No reason to worry you while you were in school,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“You’ve had cancer this whole time?” I said. “Since I was at Gardner-Webb?”

Stage Three, the folder on the kitchen table said. The word sat there thick and heavy, like it belonged in someone else’s story.

“What stage?” I asked anyway, even though I already knew.

She hesitated. “Three,” she said. “Ale budu v pořádku. I’ll be fine.”

She squeezed my hand. “You didn’t come home to waste time worrying about me,” she insisted. “You came home to work on your YouTube. So work.”

“How am I supposed to think about thumbnails when—” My voice cracked.

“Nicholas,” she cut in. “I don’t want you to treat me differently. I want us to be the same as we’ve always been: you pursuing your dreams, and me cheering you on.”

I wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand. “Okay,” I said. “But I’m driving you to your appointments.”

“That,” she said, “I will allow.”

The next few months were a bizarre mix of hospital corridors and deadlines.

Dad was angrier than I’d ever seen him. Not at me, not exactly. At the doctors, at the bills, at the way people said “prognosis” in soft voices and suggested clinical trials in distant American cities like Phoenix and Boston and Houston.

Every appointment ended the same way: with him demanding different answers that didn’t exist, and Mom smiling faintly at the nurse as if apologizing for his temper.

At night, behind the closed door of their bedroom, they fought in low, urgent Czech. About money. About work. About the son who had just walked away from a fully funded college education to chase a career on the internet they didn’t fully understand.

I filmed and edited and uploaded like a man possessed.

“What’s up, guys?” I’d say into the camera, forcing energy I didn’t feel. “Today we’re going to be playing…”

Every dollar I made went straight back into the house. Medical bills, groceries, gas for trips to the hospital in the next town over. It wasn’t much at first. But it was something. And it felt like the only thing I could control.

Mom, for her part, refused to let cancer swallow everything.

“You need to remember to eat,” she’d say, tapping my shoulder and setting a plate by my keyboard. “And drink something that is not energy drink.”

“You don’t have to take care of me,” I’d protest. “You’re the one—”

“None of that,” she’d scold. “We talked about this. Show me one of your videos.”

We’d sit together on the couch, laptop balanced between us, her head resting lightly against my shoulder as my latest upload played. She’d laugh in all the right places, her eyes shining with pride even when the joke was dumb.

“Wow,” she’d say at the end. “That’s great.”

“You’re biased,” I’d say.

“Of course,” she’d reply. “I’m your mother.”

She was stubbornly independent to a fault. On days when she was so weak she could barely stand, she’d still insist on folding laundry or making tea. “I’m okay,” she’d say when I tried to help, even as her hands trembled.

As the months passed, the treatments stopped working. The weight she’d lost didn’t come back. The hair did, briefly, but thinner, grayer.

When the cancer spread to her brain, the words stopped.

She could still understand me; I could see it in her eyes, bright and aware, trapped behind a body that wouldn’t cooperate. I’d sit by her bed and talk about everything and nothing.

“I hit 250,000 subscribers today,” I told her once, holding up my phone so she could see the count. “Quarter of a million, Mom. You always asked for updates, so… there it is.”

Her lips twitched. Her eyes shone.

“I wish you could yell at me about getting a B,” I said, trying to joke. “I think I could ace exams now, just so you know.”

My voice broke on the last word.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” I said abruptly, standing up. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

In the mirror over the sink, my face looked unfamiliar. Dark circles, stubble, weight I hadn’t noticed piling on. Grief has a way of making you hyper-aware of some things and blind to others.

When I walked back into the room, everything was wrong.

“Mom?” I said. “Mom?”

No response.

I can’t tell you the exact moment when you realize the world has permanently tilted. It’s not like in movies where everything slows down and violins swell. It’s more like the sound gets sucked out of the room, leaving you with your own heartbeat and a silence that will never fully leave.

The funeral was small. Some neighbors. A few relatives. The pastor at the little church down the road from our North Carolina house, the one with the white steeple and the sign out front that changed sayings every week.

I stood at the front holding a crumpled piece of paper with a eulogy written on it and realized I couldn’t read any of the words I’d prepared.

So I spoke from the only place I could: that space between my ribs where her voice lived.

“Milota Ulehla was a simple woman,” I began. “She was a stay-at-home mom. A bit strict. Very stubborn. And, if I’m honest, I rarely saw her happy.”

A few people chuckled nervously.

“Looking back,” I said, “I think that’s because she was always making sure we had happy lives. That we lived lives that fulfilled us. She saved her joy for us.”

My throat burned.

“I don’t think I would be who I am today if it wasn’t for her. She was always in my corner. Whether that was at a tennis match under the American sun or on the other end of the phone when I was making the hardest decision of my life in a dorm room in North Carolina.”

I swallowed hard.

“She showed up. Always. A bit strict. Very stubborn. But endlessly supportive. If you do good, good will always come back to you—she said that so many times I can hear it in my sleep.”

I looked at the simple wooden casket draped in flowers. A tiny U.S. flag tucked in among them, because this was her home now, too.

“I hope,” I said, “that somewhere, she knows I’m trying to live in a way that would make her proud.”

No one really teaches you how to grieve in America. Or anywhere else, probably. We’re all just improvising.

I didn’t improvise very well.

After the funeral, people stopped dropping by with casseroles. The world kept spinning: kids in my neighborhood still biked past our house; the mail still arrived; my YouTube dashboard still pinged with notifications.

I did the only thing I knew how to do. I worked.

I edited. I filmed. I uploaded. I answered emails. I took on more clients. I cut myself off from almost everyone—old teammates, online friends, extended family. I lived in a cheap apartment with blinds drawn, the glow of my monitor my only constant.

DoorDash knew my address better than my own father did during that period. I stopped paying attention to what I ate, only that it was fast. Burgers, pizza, whatever showed up in a paper bag. Exercise dwindled from “maybe I’ll go for a run” to “I walked to the fridge, that counts.”

One day, an old friend from back in the tennis days texted me a photo.

It was from a match years earlier. Mom and me, side by side, my arm slung around her, both of us squinting into the sun. I was lean, tan, the kind of fit that comes from thousands of hours on a court.

I looked up from my phone and caught my reflection in the dark screen of my TV.

“What happened to you, Nick?” I asked the stranger staring back.

Grief had carved me into someone I didn’t recognize. I’d gained weight, sure—about forty pounds. But it was more than that. My eyes looked dull. My shoulders slumped. The kid who’d once sprinted for every ball on court now sat for hours without moving more than his fingers.

For the first time since Mom died, I realized that “doing good” didn’t just mean working hard. It meant taking care of the one person she’d begged me to protect: myself.

My first hire wasn’t an editor or a manager. It was a personal trainer.

“Come on!” he yelled in the echoing gym a couple blocks from my apartment. “Give me one more! It’s in you!”

Sweat dripped onto the rubber mat. My arms shook. My lungs burned the way they used to during suicide sprints back in high school.

I racked the weights and collapsed onto a bench, chest heaving.

“This better be worth it,” I groaned.

He grinned. “You’ll thank me when you can breathe walking up stairs again.”

He was right. Over the next few months, my body slowly remembered what it felt like to move. My brain started to clear, too. The fog lifted a bit each time I pushed myself past what I thought I could still do.

With some physical structure back in my life, I started building structure in my work.

I hired an editor to help with my channel. Then a thumbnail designer. I reached out to streamers I admired and literally paid them to review my videos and tear them apart.

“You relied too much on jump cuts here,” one said, live on stream to thousands of viewers. “You have to let moments breathe.”

“Your hook is weak,” another said. “No one cares about your intro until you make them care.”

It stung. But Mom hadn’t raised me to fold at constructive criticism. I took notes.

Then, one day, a popular streamer with a massive audience pulled up one of my videos on his channel without me having to pay him a cent.

“This guy’s editing is crazy,” he said. “Who is this?”

Chat exploded. My analytics did too.

For the first time, I watched a video go from a few thousand views to hundreds of thousands in a single day. Then a million.

From there, it was like riding a roller coaster I’d built myself. We posted better, tighter content. We iterated. My team grew. So did the numbers.

Half a million subscribers. Then one million. Then two.

When we hit five million, my dad flew in.

We celebrated in a small restaurant just off a U.S. highway, the kind with red vinyl booths and framed black-and-white photos of American landmarks on the walls—Route 66, the Golden Gate Bridge, Times Square.

“I’m so proud of you,” Dad said, raising his glass of iced tea. His accent softened the words, but the pride in his eyes was crystal clear. “Five million people. Watching you. For your job.”

“Better than just one angry coach,” I joked.

He laughed. “Better than old job for me, too,” he said. “My colleagues, they ask, ‘How is your son, the YouTube man?’ Now I can say, ‘He is successful.’” His eyes shone for a second, and he cleared his throat. “Your mother would be… I don’t have word. Very proud.”

“Yeah,” I said, staring at the condensation on my glass. “I just wish she was here to see this in person. Not just… wherever she is.”

“She is always supporting you,” he said quietly. “No matter the distance.”

The waitress dropped off our food. Burgers, fries, something deep-fried and golden. As she walked away, a familiar voice cut through the clatter of dishes and chatter.

“Hey, Nick!”

I turned.

Coach Swain stood a few feet away, wearing a polo with a different school logo now, but the visor was the same. Time had added weight around his middle and lines around his mouth, but his eyes were instantly recognizable: sharp, assessing, critical.

“Heard you dropped out of Gardner-Webb,” he said. “Shame. If you’d listened to my advice, you’d be going pro by now.”

There was the old script, right on cue.

Once, that comment would’ve gutted me. Once, I would have walked away replaying every missed opportunity. Now, I just saw a man still living on a court in his own head, unable to imagine success in any form that didn’t involve a scoreboard.

“Yeah,” I said calmly. “Well, my mom always said if you do good, good will come back to you. I’m not too worried.”

He snorted. “You still believe that?” he asked. “Good luck, lad.”

As he walked away, I realized something: his opinion no longer had any power over me. My path didn’t need his approval. It never had.

Two weeks later, I saw his face again. This time, not in person.

It was on the local news site, sandwiched between an article about a Fourth of July parade and a story about a new strip mall opening next to the interstate.

“Former University Tennis Coach Arrested in Scholarship Fraud Scheme,” the headline read.

The article detailed how he’d been running a side hustle convincing families across the country to pay him for “exclusive recruitment opportunities”—money he took in exchange for promises he couldn’t deliver. Fake scouting trips, invented offers from big-name programs, doctored emails.

Parents from all over the U.S.—Texas, Ohio, Florida—were coming forward. Investigators had been building a case for months.

I stared at the screen as an old photo of him flashed by, whistle around his neck, visor perched proudly on his head.

In my chest, something unknotted.

I didn’t feel vindictive. I didn’t cheer. I just felt… confirmed.

He’d built his empire on fear and pressure and half-truths. He’d told kids like me that the only worthy dream was the one that served him.

Mom had told me something different.

If you do good, good will always come back to you.

It didn’t mean the universe owed you favors. It didn’t mean bad things wouldn’t happen to good people—if anyone disproved that, it was her.

But it did mean that living with integrity, with kindness, with hard work and a willingness to walk away from what was wrong, created a kind of gravity. The right people, the right chances, the right justice, eventually found their way back.

The cops in the video walked up to him, hands resting on their belts. “Mr. Swain?” one of them said. “You’re under arrest.”

“For what?” he demanded. “Answer me!”

He got his answer.

I closed the tab and opened my editing software.

On my second monitor, a paused frame of one of my latest videos waited: me at my setup, an American flag small but visible on the wall behind me, a reminder of the country my parents had chased, the one I was still figuring out how to belong to.

“Hey, guys,” I said as I hit record, the red light blinking to life. “Today, I want to talk about something different. About plans, and parents, and how sometimes the thing you think will ruin your life turns out to be the best decision you ever made.”

I thought of Mom in that kitchen years ago, stirring something on the stove, telling me in Czech-accented English that good has a way of circling back.

And as the cameras rolled and my story flowed, I realized she’d been right all along.