About Michael
About Bio
Michael Popienko is an independent writer, songwriter, retired USPTA Elite Tennis Professional, husband, father, grandfather, and lifelong student of human possibility.
He has been married to his wife, Bonnie, for 45 years. He is the father of two and the grandfather — “Grando” — of five. Much of his writing grows from that place: the lived responsibility of family, teaching, aging, wondering, and asking what kind of world adults are leaving behind for children.
Michael’s personal mission statement is simple:
I bring transformation into the lives of people I come into contact with.
For more than four decades, Michael taught tennis as far more than a sport. He worked with thousands of students, coached juniors and adults, helped more than 25 young players receive college tennis scholarships, toured Europe with nationally ranked players, and built teams across the Atlanta tennis community. A retired USPTA Certified Elite Tennis Professional, Pro Level 1, he has been a member of the United States Tennis Professional Association and the Georgia Professional Tennis Association since 1987, and a Life Member of the United States Tennis Association since 1981.
His playing and coaching life includes winning the USTA 55s 3.5 National Championship in 2023, competing collegiately at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, winning more than 60 ALTA City Championships, and more than 150 ALTA Divisional Championships with adult and junior teams. He was nominated for GPTA Independent Pro of the Year in 1995 and 1998, and hosted the radio show Tennis Talk with Dr. Mike in 1996.
Tennis gave Michael a lifelong classroom. It taught him how people handle pressure, failure, competition, cooperation, frustration, courage, and change. It also helped shape one of the central questions of his later writing:
What are the children watching us do?
Beyond tennis, Michael is a songwriter, guitarist, music lover, chess player, certified SCUBA diver, motorcycle rider, community volunteer, and lover of philosophy, wellness, nature, and life itself. His work grows from many lived worlds: family, sport, music, faith, civic responsibility, walking through forests, listening to children, and wondering what it means to be human on Earth at this moment in time.
At the center of Michael’s writing is one original word: iUniversian.
An iUniversian is anything and everything that was, is, or ever may be — known, unknown, or still beyond human knowing. It may be singular or collective, abstract or physical, tangible or intangible: a person, thought, silence, song, tree, culture, planet, universe, or any gathered whole of many iUniversians.
Michael offers iUniversian thought as an invitation: a way of seeing individuality and belonging at the same time.
His writing brings together peace, music, nature, science, faith, philosophy, imagination, civic life, and responsibility to future generations. The purpose is not to claim a final answer, but to open a wider way of seeing existence, humanity, and the future we are shaping together.
This website is an invitation into Michael Popienko’s evolving iUniversian framework: a way of thinking about existence, humanity, peace, imagination, responsibility, and the future we are leaving to children.
It is not a final answer.
It is an opening.
