'King of the Court': The making of Altoona’s resident sport-humanities scholar

ALTOONA, Pa. — It’s 9 p.m. on a Wednesday, and Kyle King is still making a racket. He is three hours deep into a pickleball session, but after a full day of preparing for classes, shepherding his daughters to school and teaching courses at Penn State Altoona, exhaustion is finally setting in. He says it’s a good feeling, though. He’s finishing out hump day with his favorite activity — moving his body and focusing his mind on the next shot, the quickest reaction, and the unexpected angle.

“I often have trouble getting to sleep on the days I play late into the evening,” King said. “I’m replaying things in my mind and planning adjustments for the next time I face certain opponents or play with certain partners. But I love the way the sport focuses my energy for a while, resets my cortisol levels, and helps me to be the person I need to be in the other areas of my life.”

One of those areas is as an associate professor of English and communication arts and sciences at Penn State Altoona. Getting to this point is as intertwined with tennis as the strings on a racket.

“I loved basketball and baseball as a kid,” King says. “But there was a very low ceiling for a 5’6” basketball player, and no one was interested in a left-handed pitcher whose fastball couldn’t get a speeding ticket in a school zone.”

King was a successful golfer who once held a five handicap, but he seemed to truly find his stride on the tennis team at Greenville High School in western Pennsylvania.

King described his first years playing tennis in the same language that the creative writer David Foster Wallace used to describe his own youth play: “craven retrieval.”

When playing tennis, King serves left-handed. However, because he was used to batting and golfing left-handed, he said, he felt more comfortable hitting what is typically a right-handed player’s two-handed backhand. In essence, King becomes a right-handed player after the serve, switching back to his left hand only occasionally for overhead smashes.

But he eventually learned how to construct points around the racket-switching, a flat backhand drive, and his service return game, all of which he said is unusual for a men’s player.

“If I had tried to play according to conventional standards, my competitive tennis career would have been over very quickly, because I started so much later and didn’t have the size and strength of many of the people I played against,” King said. “I had to think about what I could do differently, how I could make people uncomfortable by playing unconventionally against their accustomed patterns and rhythms. The psychological component of tennis — understanding what’s going on in someone else’s head — suits me.”

As King debated where to attend college, playing tennis took precedence. He said he chose NCAA Division-II Mercyhurst College (now NCAA Division-I Mercyhurst University) in Erie, Pennsylvania, largely because the tennis coach told him he would have a chance to compete for a starting spot.

“I loved going to a small campus where I had the opportunity to learn how to do a lot of things. I played tennis, I taught tennis, I worked on the school newspaper, I was a research assistant, and I worked at the campus writing center. The foundations of my professional life and my scholarly interests were forged at Mercyhurst,” King said.

At Mercyhurst, King majored in English and double minored in history and philosophy, graduating summa cum laude while being named an Academic All-American in 2010. He accepted an offer to graduate school in Penn State’s English department and began teaching rhetoric and composition just three months after his own college graduation.

Kings said he relied a great deal on his experiences teaching tennis in his early days of teaching classes — motivating students one-on-one, setting goals, and breaking down complex technical processes into their component parts.

He also developed an analogy for students that he still uses to this day, eight years into his time at Penn State Altoona.

He explained that student-athletes and the students who love the gym know exactly how to build and fuel their bodies: they need disciplined habits; they need to cultivate flexibility; and they need to push themselves beyond their comfort zone regularly. They also need to be well-nourished and rested.

“Your brain is a muscle, too,” King continues. “You have to train your mind in the same way that you train your body. Build the habits and fuel it correctly, and you’ll see the gains. There are no shortcuts.”

As King proceeded through graduate coursework at Penn State, tennis once again took center court.

“There was a time when I wasn’t sure that I wanted to stay in academia,” King said. “I was thinking about teaching tennis for a living or teaching English abroad. I was having trouble coming up with ideas for seminar papers, and I joked with a friend that I was going to find a way to write about tennis in all three of my courses, regardless of their subject area.”

King took on his own challenge. He managed the feat, and versions of two of the projects have since been published.

The first was an essay on the tennis writings of David Foster Wallace, which King had been reading for pleasure for years, he said.

The other focused on Billie Jean King’s victory over Bobby Riggs in the 1973 Battle of the Sexes exhibition tennis match. (Disappointingly for him, he said, the professor is not related to the well-known activist athlete.)

“I probably spent nearly 10 years, on and off, working on that project,” King said. “It kept evolving because new things kept happening, including the 'Battle of the Sexes' film and Billie Jean donating her archives to the New York Historical, an American history museum and library.”

King’s scholarly work with tennis continued with a review of Billie Jean’s 2021 memoir, "All In," and his essay "Sport Spectacle, Billie Jean King, and the Battle of the Sexes in Public Memory," which appeared in a 2023 issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs.

This past winter, the "Battle of the Sexes" was reinterpreted for a new generation of tennis fans when the sports marketing company Evolve staged an exhibition match with modified rules between Belarussian women’s player Aryna Sabalenka and Australian men’s player Nick Kyrgios in Dubai.

Before the match, King was interviewed by the Lisbon newspaper "Expresso" (available in English), for his views on the event.

Separately, with three colleagues from the kinesiology department at University Park, King also co-authored an essay for the Conversation titled, “Tennis is set for a ‘Battle of the Sexes’ sequel — with no movement behind it,” that was viewed more than 13,000 times in the days leading up to the match.

Lead author Jaime Schultz, professor of kinesiology at University Park, had previously connected one of her graduate students, Sydney Johnson-Aguirre, with King regarding their shared interest in King’s newest racket-based athletic pursuit — pickleball, of course.

“I was at a crossroads in my personal life at the end of 2023,” King said. He explained that he and his then-wife had separated, and the guys he was playing tennis with took new academic jobs out of the state.

“I was looking to build a new community and throw myself into a new hobby. I can still hit a tennis ball like a college player, but it’s tougher on my body," he said. "It’s easier to play pickleball with a range of ages and skill levels, while still testing myself on technique and strategy and psychology.”

Now, King said he tries to play between four and eight hours a week on courts in State College, Boalsburg and Altoona. There are occasional tournaments at the 4.5 and 5.0 level, and this past summer he even began offering lessons.

Reflecting on what pickleball has brought him, King said, “Gratitude is the primary word that comes to mind — gratitude to have met the community of players in Blair and Centre Counties, gratitude to have my health and a competitive outlet, gratitude for the folks who have built courts and are willing to share them with others, and gratitude to have the opportunity to teach others how to play.”

He said what he likes most about pickleball is how democratic it can be at its best.

“People of all ages, genders, political orientations, and skills share a court. The barriers to entry, in terms of cost and fitness, are much lower than tennis, and the potential lifetime benefits are enormous," he said.

King added that he sees parallels between the sport he plays and the lessons he tries to impart in his teaching and research on sport.

“Every sport organization is in some ways a reflection of the society in which it originates and the people who play the sport,” he says. “But every sport organization also always has the capability of being remade, to help us build a better version of the world that we want to live in. Sport is not only a mirror of society, but it’s also a worldmaking tool.”

King said he believes that the world sport builds and the meaning it holds are both social creations and deeply personal. When he teaches the "Sports, Ethics, and Literature" course, he asks students to create an “Athletic Identity Project,” writing a chapter of their sporting memoir to reveal at least some of the ways that sport has shaped them.

“I know that I am the product of all the people who’ve imprinted themselves on me and given me their time and energy, on the court and in the classroom, from Greenville to Mercyhurst to University Park to now at Penn State Altoona,” King said. “I’m incredibly fortunate that I’ve been able to integrate my personal passions into my academic scholarship and my teaching. When I step in front of the classroom or on a court, I need to do my best to honor all those people and the help they’ve given me. As much as I can, I’d like to pay it forward.”

Anyone interested in tennis, pickleball, or King's scholarly work, may contact him at kyle.king@psu.edu.