People throughout the sports world, from athletes to arena staff members, tell The New York Times how their lives have changed during the coronavirus pandemic.

Ron Yu fell hard for tennis when he was an undergraduate at Georgia Tech — so hard that he never completed his degree, leaving after less than two years.

“I was just spending so much time playing tennis and hanging around the tennis shop where I’d started to work,” Yu said. “Looking at my grades, they were about ready to kick me out anyway, so it wasn’t so difficult a decision at that stage.”

An American who was born in South Korea and immigrated to the United States as an infant with his Korean parents, Yu became one of the world’s premier racket technicians. He strings rackets and also customizes them by modifying handles and grips and adding weight to the frames. He has played a role behind the scenes in 23 Grand Slam singles titles for players including Andre Agassi, Lleyton Hewitt, Stan Wawrinka and Roger Federer.

Yu, 52, has worked at the boutique racket services company Priority One since 2001. Founded by Pete Sampras’s former racket technician Nate Ferguson, Priority One works exclusively for a small group of elite men’s players, including the No. 1-ranked Novak Djokovic and Federer, who has been a client since 2004. The focus is on providing service at the four Grand Slam tournaments and top-tier events on the ATP Tour.

But like everyone else who works on the tennis circuit, Yu has had his international life grounded by the coronavirus pandemic. The professional tours are on a hiatus that began in early March and that will last at least four months, perhaps significantly longer.

Priority One has laid off one of its three technicians, Glynn Roberts, who has been the primary stringer for Djokovic and Andy Murray. Yu remained with the company, and he said he was still customizing rackets and stringing one or two a day for non-professional clients. That is a precipitous drop from the 25 to 30 he might string daily at a tournament.

“The way our contracts work with the players, they pay us for the stringing and the customizing when they are playing and traveling and when we are at tournaments,” Yu said. “So currently now revenue has gone to basically zero.”

Yu said he had taken a pay cut at Priority One and moved into a part-time data-entry job near his home in Tampa, Fla., to help compensate for the lost income.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Q: How many weeks are you usually on the road during a normal year?

Yu: It was as high as 33 weeks during the heyday, but it’s now down to 26, and I’ve been happy to be down to 26.

What is it like to be off the road for the foreseeable future?

I enjoy being home with my wife. I love being able to have dinner with her every night sitting out on the patio in the evening. But I miss the travel. I miss being at tournaments, and I miss the friends I’ve made on tour, because the tour is like a little village that goes around the world. Even though you are in a new city you see the same people.

Working a part-time job outside of tennis has really shown to me how much I still love tennis. Not that this new job is terrible, but sometimes after being on the road for four or five weeks, I’d be like, ‘Oh man, I’m just tired of tennis.’ But this has clarified even more for me how great a sport it is.

What has been the impact of this tour stoppage on the racket service community?

I’ve made a lot of friends who string at Grand Slams as part of the on-site stringing service, and most of these people have their own tennis shops or work in a tennis shop, and those shops are either closed or have probably lost 80 to 90 percent of their revenue. Even in normal times, you are not going to get wealthy doing this. You may lead a very nice comfortable middle class life, but this is really devastating for the tennis community, for stringers and the shop owners.

Have you tried to support each other financially or emotionally?

Everyone is in the same boat. I don’t want to say that tennis stringers are hermit-like, but they can be fairly introverted. You might be in a room full of 10 other stringers at a tournament, and yeah, you will joke around a little bit and talk, but when you are really working hard and hustling you might not say a word to anyone for hours.

I’m not sure tennis stringers open up as much as a lot of people, and maybe they don’t ask for help as much. Maybe they should.

When you watch a match, with your knowledge of racket technology and strings, do you watch it differently from the average fan?

Probably when I see a shot and I say that shot could not have occurred 20 years ago. In the old days when most guys played with natural gut strings, you couldn’t just swing out as hard as you wanted all the time because after five, six shots you’re just going to lose control doing that. Gut is just so lively, for the most part.

Nowadays they have to put a little more topspin on it, but they are swinging almost full speed. Even when there is really a tense point and a lot of pressure, you see guys returning and they are able to swing as hard as they want. Or when a guy comes to the net and somebody on a stretch can pull it crosscourt for a clean passing shot winner, I’m like, “That shot would not happen 25 years ago.”

You’ve said that your family did not approve of your decision to leave Georgia Tech and work as a stringer. How do they feel about it now?

My mom loves the fact she can tell her friends in Korea that “my son is friends and works with Roger Federer.” So that has eased the pain.