I finally saw Challengers this week. It immediately entered my personal echelon of the great modern sports movies (as well as a gripping, thorny romantic drama). The movie does a terrific job of using the existing powerful narrative structures and character archetypes in sports to create a compelling story — the washed-up prospect, the fading star, the phenom who never got her seemingly fated shot at glory.

And as is my way, I purchased the relatively new tennis game TopSpin 2K25 immediately after, returning to my roots as a (very bad) tennis player in my youth. In a surprising turn of events, the way I played TopSpin right after seeing Challengers sort of felt like writing fanfiction — and I realized that, without recognizing it, I’d been engaging with fanfiction in my own way for years.

In the character creator, I decided to make my tennis player one of the three central characters in the movie. Forget the boys — Challengers’ most compelling star is Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan, a former teenage phenom whose knee blew up during a college match, ending her promising professional career before it started. But what if I could rewrite that narrative? What if her knee injury wasn’t quite so catastrophic, and she had another chance?

In my version of Tashi Duncan’s career, her knee injury still........

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