I Let AI Run My Life For Five Days: Thursday & Takeaways

Ray’s Tennis doesn’t look like much from the outside. Never has. It’s just a green box with cloudy windows in Hillcrest, just steps away from a McDonald’s on University Avenue. But for nearly 60 years, this place has been the genesis for three generations of San Diego tennis dreams. Head inside, and you enter one of the tennis world’s great cornucopias.

For years, there was a tennis court behind the store, where owner Bob Ray gave countless lessons. It was like a racket-sport speakeasy; most customers didn’t realize the court existed unless Bob or his wife, Hiroko, guided them through the back door of the shop. Eventually they converted it into a half-court indoors—where a patron might take a racket for a few trial thwacks, trying to avoid rounders of tennis clothes that shared the space.

The shop is an abridged living history. Relics hang from the ceiling: a model of an old metal racket used by fiery lefthander Jimmy Connors in his heyday, and a version of the wooden Donnay that Björn Borg wielded on his way to five consecutive Wimbledon championships from 1976 to 1980.

And just inside the front door is Hiroko eternally stringing new rackets, carefully threading and adjusting the tension of the polyester strings, back and forth, until she has the entire racket head strung.

“I worked seven days a week—five days off in the year,” she says. “My hearing is still good. Physically, I’m as good as I was. Working seven days a week, standing all day. I’m mentally healthier than most people.”

The racket stringing is an operation she does up to 20 times a day—and one that, in some ways, resembles the thread work done by her father decades ago, when he ran a tailor’s shop in Japan.

Hiroko, now 81, was born in the city of Yokosuka at the tail end of the WWII. Her family evacuated to the countryside to escape the bombing raids, and she remembers growing up surrounded by rice fields and mountains. It was in Japan that Hiroko met Bob, a third-generation San Diegan, in the late 1960s, when he was stationed there with the Navy.

Among his possessions at the time was a tennis racket. Inherited from his father, who died when Bob was 11, this racket changed the trajectory of his life: He played constantly, filling up his school days, afternoons, and evenings on the tennis court. He was one of the highest-ranked teen players in the state, and he dreamed of joining the international tournament circuit after his stint in the Navy. But—speaking plainly—he acknowledges that he wasn’t quite good enough to compete with the best of the best. So, instead, he modified his dreams. He and Hiroko returned to San Diego in 1968, and he took a job as the club pro at Morley Field. By their mid-20s, in lieu of touring the world on the tennis circuit, the couple was running the club’s tennis store.

They spent 11 years at Morley Field, which at the time was one of the city’s tennis epicenters, hosting major tournaments for juniors. When the city handed over the store lease to a wealthier applicant, the Rays took over the property on University Avenue and moved in their tennis gear. They have been there ever since—through the McEnroe and Navratilova and Evert eras; the rise of Agassi and Sampras and Graf; the reign of the Williams sisters; the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic rivalry; and into the Alcaraz era. In the near-half century they have sold tennis gear in Hillcrest, the Rays became beloved anchors of the neighborhood’s business community, symbols of stability in an ever-changing environment.

At 84, Bob is still lean and, in his Lacoste tracksuit and Adidas cap, remains every bit the club pro. Like Hiroko, he comes to the store every day—though sometimes, if he is playing tennis in the morning, he might arrive a little later.

But time has started to take its toll. His hearing isn’t what it used to be, and the aging process is revealing itself to be true. And much to the disappointment of their loyal clientele, San Diego’s “First Couple of Tennis” is retiring, a milestone that marks the end of an extraordinarily long chapter in the city’s tennis history.

But Ray and Hiroko didn’t sell the building to a developer for condos or to a big-box retailer looking to open a boutique outpost. Determined that Ray’s should remain a tennis temple, they have negotiated a sale to a former employee who wants to continue the Rays’ legacy.

As of this writing, Hiroko and Bob remain in charge, Hiroko stringing rackets, Bob sharing his expertise about new gear. As much as they love what they’ve built, their hope is to move on soon.

For Hiroko, the prospect of retirement is bittersweet. “What am I going to do?” she asks. “Am I going to be ok? I never had a boring life. Always busy. Business first. I’m so involved in the business—because I didn’t want to fail.”

She looks around her store as she continues stringing. For her, the gladiatorial nature of tennis has always been a metaphor for how to succeed in life. “People have to have a drive,” she says. “You can’t just quit because you lose to so-and-so. Tennis players have that mindset.”

She pauses to talk about all the people who have come through the store’s door over the decades, and the relationships she has built with them. “It’s wonderful to have a great customer. That’s probably the reason I lasted this long.”

California is home to the most women-owned businesses in the country, and San Diego is a hot spot for women entrepreneurs. In March, we’re celebrating International Women’s Month by highlighting some of our favorite women-owned businesses throughout San Diego County—from food to flowers, photographers, and gift shops. Here are 31 ways to support local entrepreneurs this month and beyond.

Restaurants | Beverages & Spirits | Retail | Artists | Health & Wellness

Women-Owned Restaurants in San Diego

Nahomie’s Cafe & Deli 

Lizzette Amaya, an entrepreneur from Anyarit, Mexico who also owns a restaurant with her husband in La Mesa, delayed the opening of Nahomie’s Cafe & Deli in order to care for her ailing mother. When the spot for sandwiches, wraps, and coffee launched at last in August 2024, it won the National City Chamber of Commerce’s 2025 “New Business of the Year” award.

“It’s been hard trying to keep up the business,” Amaya says about trying to balance this spot with the other restaurant she owns with her husband in La Mesa, but she’s found the community to be supportive and that social media—despite being her only marketing tool right now—to be very effective for reaching new customers. 

450 E 8th St. Ste D, National City

The Fishery 

Annemarie Brown-Lorenz, daughter of The Fishery’s original owner—who has been working in restaurants herself since she was 15—took over the nearly 30-year-old seafood business’ operations during Covid. She and her husband also run Pacific Shellfish, and in 2022, food critic Troy Johnson said that after “15 years of studying food and eating at San Diego restaurants…the two meals at The Fishery were the single most excellent seafood experience I’ve had in the city.”

5040 Cass St, Pacific Beach

Balsamico Italian Kitchen

Elisa Borelli co-manages Balsamico Italian Kitchen in Imperial Beach with her husband, Michele. Though Borelli’s background is in finance, she curated the restaurant’s wine list herself and manages much of the front-of-house operations. The restaurant is known for its Italian food and—you guessed it—balsamic offerings.

791 Palm Ave #101, Imperial Beach

Teriyaki Grill

Teriyaki Grill is a women-owned business that is bringing a new flavor to Chula Vista. Owner Casey Vu loves to cook and learned much of her skills from her previous travels around the world. Her restaurant is a reflection of that and offers Asian fusion cuisine, which has a little bit of everything from octopus tacos to steak sandwiches and teriyaki burgers.

380 3rd Ave,Ste B, Chula Vista

Cucina Urbana 

Tracy Borkum, principal of Urban Kitchen Group, is credited with helping to revolutionize San Diego’s food scene. She’s spent 15 of her 25 years in the industry building and growing Bankers Hill’s Cucina Urbana, where she employs a full-time HR person to support her team—a rarity in the restaurant field. 

505 Laurel St, San Diego

Always Hungry Grocery & Goods

Always Hungry Grocery & Goods in Carlsbad Village (which also operates as a pop-up in Oceanside) is the beautiful and intentionally stocked grocery store of your dreams. “[Inventory] must be local, support an underrepresented group, be absolutely the best in their category, or just be plain fun,” owner Katie Jayne says, pointing to items like Fox Point Farms’ sugar snap peas from Encinitas or Tethos’ non-alcoholic wines from North County.

505 Oak Avenue Suite B, Carlsbad | 110 N Myers St, Oceanside

Chicken Pie Shop

North Park’s Chicken Pie Shop has been in the Townsend family for four generations over 87 years. Lisa Townsend, the daughter-in-law of the restaurant’s original owners, currently handles the day-to-day operations. As general manager, Townsend brought the business into the modern age, adding the ability to pay by credit card, launching digital time cards, and more. The restaurant makes upwards of 3,000 pies daily. 

2633 El Cajon Blvd, San Diego

Women-Owned Spirits Brands in San Diego

Altipiano Vineyard & Winery

Black- and veteran-owned Altipiano Vineyard & Winery was founded by Denise Clarke, a winemaker and internationally recognized connoisseur. She and her husband built Altipiano after losing their 900 avocado trees in a 2007 fire, and, in 2012, Clarke took over as the company’s full-time, in-house winemaker. Visit the couple’s Tuscan-style vineyard in Escondido to buy wines by the bottle, join the wine club, or participate in a private tasting. 

20365 Camino Del Aguila, Escondido

Mujeres Brew House

Owner Carmen Velasco-Favela opened her Barrio Logan brewery, Mujeres Brew House, during the pandemic with an all-woman leadership team. The business takes inspiration from Mexican culture and offers fruit-forward beers and cocktail seltzers.

“I am the queen of hats,” Claude Rosinsky says. It’s a fitting title, considering how many she’s worn in her 82 years. The daughter of a royal physician in Morocco, she grew up in the capital city, Rabat. She went on to work for the United Nations and, later, with fashion icons like Christian Dior. She opened a museum in Palm Beach and spent years leading medical missions in Nicaragua. And everywhere she went, she bought hats, amassing a collection numbering in the several dozens.

Then, Rosinsky came to roost in San Diego in 2012, building her nest in a most unusual location: the Fairmont Grand Del Mar.

Following a health scare in San Miguel de Allende, where she’d briefly moved after the death of her husband 15 years ago, Rosinsky was diagnosed with hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT), a condition that can cause excessive bleeding. Doctors at UC San Diego Health were among the top experts on the disease, so Rosinsky traveled here for treatment, taking a room at the Fairmont. Initially, she says, physicians gave her four months to live—but seven months on a lung medication that kept her virtually immobile dramatically extended that prognosis. The treatment has since saved others. “God gave me work to do in San Diego: to find the cure for HHT,” she adds.

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Somewhere along the way, Rosinsky realized she’d need more long-term housing. But when she informed the Fairmont she’d be checking out, she recalls, a receptionist asked, “Why? We love you here.”

“My dear,” she replied, “I can’t afford you.”

The general manager, however, suggested she make a deal—and then accepted her offer. “Welcome,” she recalls him saying. “This is your home now.”

As the hotel’s only permanent guest, she spends her days practicing pilates in her room; writing her memoirs; and dining at the resort’s onsite restaurant, Amaya, where the staff members all know her by name. “I’m the grandmother of everyone here,” she says.

The sun rises over Pechanga Arena’s parking lot, illuminating a near-endless patchwork of polyester tents, the hundreds of ad hoc storefronts that make up Kobey’s Swap Meet, the largest outdoor marketplace in San Diego.

Deep in the sea of booths, Wali Amin settles comfortably in his abyss of folding tables, crowded with a dizzying array of used doodads: shoes, CDs, a picnic basket. Amin has been buying out storage spaces for the past 12 years—but this is far from his first business venture.

“It’s in my blood,” he says. “My father was an entrepreneur, my grandfather was an entrepreneur, and so on. They used to travel the Silk Road.”

Amin’s father was a fur merchant in Kabul, Afghanistan. Amin was a tween when the Soviet Union invaded the country in 1979. His family fled to India, where Amin earned a college degree before moving to the US in 1990.

In between shifts at a gas station and as a valet driver in San Diego, Amin slung antiques at small swap meets in El Cajon. Over time, he eventually opened a high-end Italian clothing store. He married in 2000 and started a family. Then, the 2008 recession struck, and he lost everything.

“There were times, after I went bankrupt, [that] I didn’t have the money to buy McDonald’s,” he says. “[But] we have to work, you know? This country is opportunity, and it all depends on how you take it.”

Amin turned to garage sales and storage unit auctions to rebuild his business. “The best thing about doing this is the excitement of what comes out of the box,” he says. “It might be gold, and then there’s times that rats jump out.”

A customer pauses at one of Amin’s tables to pluck a beautiful acoustic guitar—one of the many treasures Amin pulled from obscurity. The drive to make the most from the least seems to be another family trait.

“[My brother] always used to tell me that you have to make good out of your bad,” Amin says.

One look and it’s easy to see that local jewelry designer Georgina Treviño is overcaffeinated. She has to be. She’s just returned from a whirlwind trip where she finished a workshop residency at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina—while also finding time to pop up and down to LA and Mexico City to, among other things, deliver some custom pieces for a “very important, very secretive” client who sought her out to accessorize his outfit for Chloë Sevigny and gallerist Siniša Mačković’s wedding in Connecticut. Now she’s finally back at her Little Italy studio. And while she found time to create two custom pieces for the bride and groom, anyone who knows Treviño would not be surprised to learn she’s already onto the next thing.

“I feel like I love to go into the chaos knowing that I can come home,” she says, adding that she often gets asked why, after all she’s accomplished so far, she doesn’t simply move. “I love San Diego. I just love being here, because I’m in between both worlds.”

Following Treviño’s Instagram is something of a whirlwind experience itself; a crash course in what it means when an up-and-coming designer generates enough buzz to where they’re becoming the go-to accessory for photo shoots and step-and-repeats for the likes of Olivia Rodrigo, Lady Gaga, and Bad Bunny, the latter of whom insisted on keeping a pair of earrings she created after he wore them for a music video. “That almost made me cry,” she admits.

Inspired by lowbrow pop culture as much as by ’80s punk rock aesthetics, Treviño’s custom rings, bracelets, and dangles have appeared in Teen Vogue, Purple magazine, and most recently, the Los Angeles Times, who commissioned her for a custom spread in their style magazine, Image. This is in addition to her even more notable accomplishments, such as appearances in a Nike Air Max campaign and a deal to bring her signature pierced designs to Chunks hair products. She’ll also be customizing purses and creating her own in- store intervention for Spanish fashion tastemaker Bimba y Lola inside their Mexico City storefront. Not bad for an Otay Ranch local who, only a few years ago, switched her SDSU major from painting to metalsmithing.

Next up, she says she’s going to check out real estate while in Mexico City in hopes of opening her own brick-and- mortar space there. “There are so many more, other things I want to do to challenge myself,” Treviño says. “I’m just going to figure out how to do it, you know?”