Ade Adepitan retired from international wheelchair basketball in 2006 after winning more than 90 caps for Great Britain and being part of the team that won bronze at the Athens Paralympics.

But there was no fear of him going quietly into retirement and he has found a new challenge in wheelchair tennis.

He has competed in Australia and South Africa already this year and is now ranked inside the world's top 150 for singles and top 80 in doubles.

Here he tells BBC Sport about getting to grips with a new sport and his hopes of reaching the 2012 Paralympics.

I think a lot of my friends in the basketball community probably thought (and still think) I'd lost my mind when they heard I was playing tennis.

To be honest, there have been plenty of moments over the past year when I've questioned my sanity, having dedicated most of my free time to playing what is known as a quintessentially English sport.

The team approach to training could be the defining factor that takes me back home to Stratford in 2012

It would be hard to find two sports so far removed from each other as basketball and tennis.

The toughest part of changing sports has been the large dent the transition has made to my ego. Call it competitiveness or the will to win, it's all the same; elite athletes want success and losing only brings fear and doubt.

A good friend and teammate of mine in Spain used to say "when you lose a game of basketball, it feels like you lose the right to be a man".

I'm sure some of what he meant was lost in translation and it also sounds much better in Castellano but ultimately I think Fernando was saying that you lose a part of your identity.

This fear made it difficult to totally to commit to tennis - after all, there were far easier options out there.

Fortunately, the last year hasn't been entirely filled with ego-bashing, and soul-searching. It has also been a really good laugh.

When people asked the inevitable question "why tennis?", my answer was usually "because it's a new challenge" and I would find myself inwardly rolling my eyes and sighing at the cliché.

The truth is if you had a chance to do something amazing like become a successful basketball player but then you were given the opportunity to do it all again in a different sport - but this time with the benefit of hindsight - who wouldn't jump at that opportunity?

Ade celebrates at an end of tournament dinner in South Africa

My first tennis tournament was the British national championships in Gloucester in 2007. Before this I just played for fun for a few hours a week over at the Queens Club in London.

I turned up to the nationals with what I thought at the was an extremely good tennis racket, but I was swiftly told by my coach Stuart Wilkinson that it was the most popular model for people over the age of 60 who played at retirement homes in Spain.

On the plus side, the racket could also double as a snow shoe if I ever decided to go hiking in Alaska!

Learning to play tennis has been extremely difficult and now I appreciate even more the achievements of the players like McEnroe, Becker, and Agassi, who I used to watch with my dad on TV, and now also the leading British wheelchair tennis players like Gordon Reid, Marc McCarroll and Peter Norfolk.

In fact, I spent the first few months wondering how it was possible to hit more balls off the frame of the racket than the strings.

I'm sure tennis can be a lonely sport when it is just you against your opponent in singles with no teammates to back you up and no substitutions when you are not playing well. But all sports have their moments when you feel like it's you against the world.

606: DEBATE Will Ade make it to London 2012?

I started getting proper tennis coaching in April last year and have trained with the same group of players since then. We all usually travel together, the banter is great and the competition between us is becoming fierce.

I feel this team approach to training combined with one-on-one coaching sessions, which is not too dissimilar to the wheelchair basketball set-up, could be the defining factor that takes me back home to Stratford in 2012 - this time swinging a tennis racket instead of shooting a basketball.

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