“She’s a little bit tight, a little strict,” her father, Gil, a colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, said. “She demands a lot from herself and from her family.”
But Tahan is also the one who makes them laugh with her celebrity imitations and “unusual” sense of humor. In her limited free time, she watches Israeli reality TV and standup comedy in Hebrew to help clear her head. She can make any situation funny—even a missile threat.
When Tahan was still in Israel, an alarm sounded one night to warn the family that a projectile from Gaza, where the Israeli-Palestine conflict is in full force, was headed to their neighborhood in central Israel. It was Tahan who sprang into action, waking all her sisters and mother (her father was away on vacation) and getting them to the shelter downstairs. It’s a harrowing story, but Tahan laughs the whole way through, telling me about how hilarious it was when her mother, Merav, forgot that her husband was on vacation amid the confusion.
“[The blast] was pretty close to our house, so we were really lucky actually,” Tahan admits. “I was the only one who was awake and ready to do everything. But it was funny.”
It’s clear where Tahan gets her sense of humor from. When asked if everyone was okay, Gil Tahan quickly interjects, “Yes, I was very okay in the snow in Austria.”
He goes on to describe a girl who chose to be homeschooled so that she could devote more time to tennis, a girl who skipped the parties and social life of a normal teenager so she could wake up early and go to practice, a girl whose quick thinking could have saved her family’s lives and whose storytelling makes a scary situation into one of the family’s favorite stories.
“We like to do things together,” Tahan said. “It’s never boring. With each of [my sisters], I have something special.” She talks about late night chats over ice cream with her younger sister, inside jokes, and cooking competitions that her parents refuse to judge so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings. (But yes, Tahan does think she won.)
Her longtime coach, Eyal Omid, works for the International Tennis Academy, where most of the best players come from. He says Tahan is “one of the best” tennis players he’s ever worked with because of her dedication and discipline. After a bad loss, many players will take some time off to rest and clear their heads. Not Maya Tahan. After every loss, she is back in practice the next day.
The night before her first international tournament, Tahan called Omid to tell him she didn’t want to play. “[She said] she’s not ready, she’s not sure about her tennis [skills], and she doesn’t feel confident.” By the end of the week, she had won the tournament.
“I was proud of her every day, [of] her willingness to improve,” Omid said. “What’s very interesting about her is that she’s an all-around player. She can play many, many different ways. I think she’s still looking for the best style of tennis that will make her the best player she can be.”
