Player development: differences by nation [series]

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“There’s some jealousy (by others),” says Alex Clayton, the US junior claycourt champion and Young’s doubles partner in Kalamazoo. “He’s No. 1. But there’s always going to be a No. 1 in anything, and everybody wants to be No. 1. He’s also only 16. It’s hard to say that anybody 15 to 18 is going to be No. 1. There are no guarantees.”

That point makes the entire debate about player development, regardless of how anyone feels about the United States Tennis Association system or what coaches are doing in the private sector. You can never really be sure of whether champions are born or made. Furthermore, USTA Player Development, as currently set up, is intended to be a supplemental effort anyway.

“National bodies have done a very poor job in the past of developing players,” says Craig Tiley, the former University of Illinois men’s tennis coach who was hired by Tennis Australia as director of Player Development in June. “The proof is in the numbers. Now it’s sounding like the USTA is definitely on this track: They’ve realized that they’re very much a service agent that needs to provide a competitive pathway that they fund well. They’re not going to be solely responsible for developing a player, but they can have a huge part in it together with a private coach.”

Funding, however, is very much an issue for USTA Player Development and the audience it serves. Critics are outspoken in saying the USTA doesn’t spend enough on junior tennis, among other things. “The pittance they put in junior tennis,” says Tom Walker, coach of Scott Oudsema, the 2004 USTA Boys’ 18 National Championships singles and doubles runner-up, “that number should be astronomical.”

From top to bottom in USTA Player Development, they know that their $14 million budget makes it tough for them to realize the goal of High Performance (once the name of the Player Development program, now a unit thereof), which is to develop American Grand Slam tournament champions. That $14 million includes the USTA Pro Circuits, the 92-tournament minor leagues of professional tennis in the United States. The USTA Player Development staff based at training centers in Key Biscayne, Fla., and Carson, Calif., really work from a budget of about $9 million, roughly 4 percent of total USTA annual expenditures.

A common complaint about US player development – no necessarily a USTA Player Development criticism – is that the top players don’t often play against each other, which has been proven to help maximize their abilities. The USTA tries to bring the players together as often as possible either in Key Biscayne or Carson, but without housing, the High Performance coaches can’t do as much as they would like to do.

“[Other countries] don’t understand why we’re (the United States) bigger than everyone else and we have more money than everyone else,” says Rodney Harmon, USTA Player Development director of Men’s Tennis, “but we don’t have what they have (in terms of training facilities).”

Says Paul Roetert, managing director of USTA Player Development, “There is a small number of High Performance players who want full-time coaching. We haven’t been able to do that because we don’t provide housing. The housing is a bit of an issue on a small basis.”

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While Roetert is talking in his office in Key Biscayne, Amer Delic, who played for Tiley in Illinois, walks by. Delic is the 2003 NCAA men’s singles champion and helped Illinois to the NCAA team title that year. He is representative of the improving trend of US players using the USTA training centers and working out with one another as often as they can. In Kalamazoo, Dent confessed to having hit with eventual boys’ 18s runner-up Sam Querrey three days before the junior nationals began.

Still, such sessions don’t happen enough. “The best playing the best is the blueprint,” says Steve Johnson, the teaching pro at Rancho San Clemente Tennis & Fitness Club in San Clemente, Calif., where he coaches his 15-year-old son, Steve. “In my opinion, that’s why America has fallen behind. In other countries, (top players) play each other.”

Another father, former tour pro Robert Seguso, has still another take on why US tennis slipped and what it needs to do to return to the No. 1 position internationally. Says Seguso, the former US Davis Cup doubles star whose son Holden is ranked No. 69 in the world, “It’s not the coaches. It’s not the USTA. You gotta make (the kids) work.

“The problem is the American kids are spoiled. They (the USTA) take them to these camps and work them hard. Then you know what the kids do after the camps? They don’t do anything for three days because they’re so tired. [Other countries] lifted the level because of how hard they train. We have to keep up with that. Everybody else got better. We didn’t keep up.”

Says Todd Martin, who was the poster boy of USTA Player Development in the early ’90s, but now coaches Fish, “It’s up to the player to make (Player Development) work for them as well as possible. That’s what’s really lost in the shuffle. The players’ role is the most critical. I would compare it to any team. The coach can be hired and fired, but essentially it’s the players who are out there doing the work in any sport.”

Indeed, kids have been dropped from USTA Player Development because of poor work habits. Sell says that he had about 14 to 15 boys when he started working with the 1989 birth-year group. Of that original lot, about a third are still around. “But who’s going to step up and join that third?” he asks.

Next year, the USTA will starting bringing 13-year-olds to training camps, hoping to install a strong work ethic in the boys sooner. The one year difference, the USTA hopes, will help them develop better players. Historically, the United States has had some of the best players in the world up to the age of 14. Then, something happens. It might be the allure of team sports. It might be the stagnation because the top players don’t player together. Says Seguso, it’s the lack of hard work.

“In other countries, they’re training at 10 and 11,” he says. “Here, they don’t start with the kids until they’re 15.”

The accountability that USTA coaches are expecting of the players is what private coaches have wanted to see from the USTA coaches for years. Mark Bey, who coaches top-ranked US 16-and-under player Dennis Nevolo of Gurnee, Ill., and runs CARE Academy in Chicago, in a four-part, 18-point assessment of USTA Player Development, puts accountability at the top of his list of weaknesses for the group. To date, he says, the USTA hasn’t been accountable to the American public. “If I’m not showing results,” Bey says, “I’m not in business.”

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Many expect to see results from USTA Player Development soon. Young men from the 1986 birth year – Oudsema, Phillip Simmonds, Brendan Evans and Scoville Jenkins – are at the tail end of their first year on the pro circuit. Jenkins, last year’s junior national champion, heads the group with his No. 389 ranking (as of Aug. 8). “When these 1986s were 14-15 years old, they were talking about these guys [and how good they looked],” says Tom Ross, senior vice president at Octagon, who signed Jenkins and Simmonds from this group. Early estimates are that the 1987s could be better. “You could say that the Americans (boys) playing junior tennis right now are as strong as any group of Americans there has been for several years,” Ross says. “They have had more consistently strong results.”

On the other hand, the roll of honor for the national championships in Kalamazoo is full of players who professional careers never really took off. In fact, the last Kalamazoo 18s champion to really have an impactful pro career was Michael Chang who won the nationals as a 15-year-old in 1987. Within two years, he had won the French Open.

Says Timon Corwin, scanning the Stowe Stadium courts at Kalamazoo College, where he is head coach and has been tournament director for the USTA Boys’ 18 and 16 National Championships for 12 years, “This crop [of players] is as good as I’ve seen since I’ve been here. The group last year was good, too. But these guys…

“Of course when Andy Roddick won doubles here in ’99, I don’t think anybody would have said he would win the US Open a few years later. But he grew; he developed a big serve. He’s a big guy (6-foot-2, 197 pounds). He wasn’t that size when he was here.”

The point is that as bright as the future might look, it is impossible to really know what’s going to happen. Too, will the best players come from USTA Player Performance or from a little-known coach somewhere who just happens to push all the right buttons on a kid that all the experts missed?

No one will know until it happens.


Andre Christopher is Tennis Week’s managing editor.

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Oh, Say Can You See…
There is only a cloudy horizon to be seen in the search for top US junior girl prospects
By Douglas Robson

Tennis Week print edition
September 29, 2005
Pgs 38-42

Back in the summer of 1997, the US tennis establishment was wringing its collective hands. The combined 36 Grand Slam tournament singles crowns collected by Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova were gathering dust while the two legends awaited certain induction into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Yugoslav-born US citizen Monica Seles had shown only glimpses of her dominant self following her 1993 stabbing. Among homegrown Americans, Lindsay Davenport had yet to emerge as a legitimate Grand Slam threat, and Jennifer Capriati was still reeling from the fallout of her teenage rebellion. The landscape of promising female talent looked dangerously barren.

In retrospect, of course, the concerns were premature – though not unfounded. Out of nowhere (if Compton, Calif., isn’t nowhere in the tennis universe, where else is?) a gangly, 17-year-old African American with an otherworldly name stormed to the US Open final, becoming the first female to do so in her debut since a 16-year-old Pam Shriver in 1978. Venus Williams lost the ’97 final to Martina Hingis, but her run signaled that the seemingly effortless production of Grand Slam-worthy talent in this country would carry on.

Eight years later, the hands are getting clammy again. Thrice-Slam tournament winner Davenport is pushing 30 and has already publicly mulled retirement. Capriati, also a three-time major champ, has not struck a competitive ball this year following shoulder surgery in January. Venus and younger sis Serena Williams both have won majors this season, but injuries and lack of commitment have limited their Slam success, and their long-term commitment to the game is perpetually in question. Granted, the sisters are only in their mid-20s, but beyond this upper crust no one seems even close to filling their shoes.

Nearly one-fifth of the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour’s Top 100 players are teenagers, but only one American, 18-year-old Jamea Jackson at No. 89, is among them. Stretch further to the Top 200, and a total of just four US teens hold a ranking (as of Aug 8) – three less than Russia, and no more than the Czech Republic. “It’s clear we are strong at the top, but there is some thinning,” says Jean Nachand, director of women’s tennis for USTA Player Development, choosing her words carefully. “I don’t know if we will ever be able to recreate the depth and strength we had 15 years ago.”

Maybe not. And perhaps that long-feared female drought will finally arrive. Or a phenom could be lurking in the background, ready to burst onto our consciousness as Venus did. But certainly there is no celebrated pigtailed pixie a la Tracy Austin or Andrea Jaeger, waiting in the wings.

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Admits Eliot Teltscher, director of tennis operations for the entire USTA Player Development program, a unit of which is High Performance: “We got so concerned with the post-Agassi and Sampras era that we sort of forgot that it could happen on the women’s side.”

If nothing else, this potential “gap” has put the nation’s development infrastructure under the microscope. And once again, questions of how, where and what are the best ways to allocate our resources are being tossed around. Are we doing the right things to make sure the next great one, whether in Compton or Coconut Grove, has a chance to develop and succeed?

The short answer is: nobody’s really sure. In conversations with USTA officials, players, agents, and coaches, the perception is that a disconnect exits somewhere in the system, in as much as there is one in the US. But no one is sure where it is or how to fix it.

“I don’t know what the true answer is,” says Katie Schlukebir, a former USTA High Performance coach now working full-time with Alexa Glatch of Newport Beach, Calif., runner-up to 16-year-old Mary Gambale of Billerica, Miss., in the USTA Girls’ 18 National Championships. “If I did, I’d be making a lot of money.”

If answers are hard to come by, solutions are harder still.

“I don’t think we’re doing something wrong,” opines uber-coach Nick Bollettieri, “but we have to look at where we are and see what we can do to make sure we have some players coming and getting athletes playing. The talent is there, no question about it.”

Unlike many smaller European countries, America’s size and diversity is a plus and a minus. With a population of about 290 million and lots of public courts, there is no dearth of enthusiastic girls or places to pick up the game. But the matrix of development here is much more complicated, diffuse and not nearly as centralized as, say, France or England. Training centers in California and Florida are far flung, making it costly to bring the best players repeatedly together, especially young kids. Social norms mean families are pulled in multiple directions, caught between a desire to see their children succeed as pros but also have an education to fall back on.

Like Bollettieri, most observers say that the talent pool remains rich. But many kids have been siphoned off to other sports, such as basketball, softball or soccer, which are cheaper, easier to grasp and involve a strong social or team element. For those not willing to bet their childhoods on becoming professionals, these sports also offer many more college scholarship opportunities than tennis.

Others say money is a big issue, as it costs anywhere from $15,000 and up for a promising junior to travel, take lessons and find court time – a prohibitive amount for many families. Some say there aren’t enough International Tennis Federation (ITF) and high-level sectional and national tournaments in the United States, while others say there are too many. Arlen Kantarian, chief executive of professional tennis for the USTA, sees the dearth top prospects between 16 and 18 as the natural ebb and flow of the sport.

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“I think everything is cyclical, and we’re confident that’ll be the case in women’s tennis,” Kantarian said in a July interview.

Some insist the disconnect isn’t in the pull of education, a proliferation of sports, periodic cycles or lack of money. It’s hunger. Robert Lansdorp, who has had a hand in the development of players stretching from Austin to Davenport to Maria Sharapova, says today’s youth are soft compared to players from other countries, especially Eastern Europe, where kids are more disciplined and easier to coach. He recounts the story of a highly-ranked 14-year-old he worked with briefly. The unnamed girl showed potential, and when Lansdorp asked her what she wanted to accomplish in tennis, she proclaimed she wanted to go to Stanford University.

“A Russian would never have said that,” Lansdorp snaps.

The onus of overcoming these obstacles falls mostly on the USTA and its Player Development program. Most observers say it’s doing a decent job, but many wonder if it’s doing enough.

Critics point to leadership turnover, a tendency to change course every couple of years and not enough money from the hefty USTA coffers.

Occasional internal turmoil has also affected the program. Former women’s High Performance director Lynne Rolley, who departed a year ago, is now suing the USTA for wrongful termination and other alleged workplace infractions, according to her Oakland, Calif.,-based lawyer, Steven Anthony. Rolley declined to speak for this article.

Rolley’s replacement, Nachand, a former WTA Tour administrative official, is aware of the continuity issues and counters that the program is on the right track.

She ticks off a host of initiatives under way – some old, some new – that will bring new stars to the fore. Among them:

• More money for kids to train regularly at the two main training facilities in Carson, Calif., and Key Biscayne, Fla.,
  
• Increased scouring of sections for exceptional talent
  
• A new five-week camp for 11-year-olds in Carson that focuses not only on tennis, but also on coordination, agility and other fun drills
  
• Improved teaching techniques for pros around the country administered through its sports science department
  
• Sessions for parents to help them navigate top-flight junior development
  
• New leadership in the form of icon Bille Jean King, who became the program’s chairwoman in January

“We need a structured approach to looking at our players, to identify talent at a young age and to make sure they have solid fundamentals,” she says.

Perhaps the biggest shift in Nachand’s one-year tenure is a push to identify and cultivate preteen talent. Whereas in years past the USTA started to deal with players around age 14, now they are looking to kids as young as 8. “In the past, that wasn’t a focus,” says Nachand.

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It’s a risky move to go after girls whose talents, interests and motivation are barely discernable. But it’s a gamble the USTA is now willing to take. As Octagon agent Wendy Fix, who works primarily with up-and-coming players (Glatch is a client), notes: “It’s hard to figure out what the right formula is for a 12-year-old kid.”

There are also attempts to identify superior athletes. For example, the USTA recently invited 11-year-old Maria Smith, daughter of NFL running back Paul Smith, to one of their camps. Maria is one of the country’s best sprinters for her age, but also enjoys tennis.

“We’re trying to broaden our stroke and not just focus on kids with a ranking,” says Nachand.

With so much money and so many kids in this country, why aren’t there more Americans in the Top 10 and Top 50? And how has Russia produced so many? It’s a comparison that makes USTA officials bristle. They say the Russian phenomenon is a bit misleading. Several top Russians, such as 2004 Wimbledon champ Maria Sharapova and 2004 US Open champ Svetlana Kuznetsova, honed their skills overseas. Sharapova spent most of her youth at Bollettieri’s academy in Florida, while Kuznetsova spent considerable time in Spain. Where they do have an advantage, officials and others say, is having competed against one another from an early age and having felt the pressure to succeed.

That’s not to say there aren’t elements wanting in the US approach. With an entire budget (Pro Circuits, High Performance, junior competition, sport science, coaches education, etc.) that has remained flat in recent years at about $13.5 million, only six to eight players from each age group can be flown into the training centers. (The US Open prize money, by comparison, increases every single year and is more than $17.7 million in 2005.) With coastal centers, some High Performance players can manage to train there only three or four times a year, and some talent in the middle of the country likely gets overlooked. Many coaches working with top players also fear and/or resent the USTA’s involvement, viewing it as an attempt to poach their prize pupils.

Doug Davis, a coach at the Austin Tennis Academy, says the USTA needs to cough up more dough to that promising juniors can travel for international competition. He cites Austin Academy regular Ashley Weinhold, who won the national 16-and-under claycourt title, as an example of a player who needs more assistance.

Davis Says Weinhod received $1,500 from the USTA this year, a drop in the bucket for the $30,000 or so she needs to compete at the top junior level.

“It is a crime that you have a player who can win national championships and wants to play and our federation doesn’t support her,” he says. “We have a system making hundreds of millions of dollars, and it’s too bad. This is R&D for the US Open. If you spend $1 million, $5 million (on junior players), what does it matter? That’s how you get people to watch the US Open and be part of that profit.”

It’s not just the money. It’s also surface. Many coaches say that the USTA should sanction more tournaments on clay, where juniors can learn the nuances of point construction.

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Nachand’s boss, Teltscher, is aware of the various fits and starts, but says it’s a matter of staying the course because in the past, top prospects “almost fell in our lap.”

“I won’t say we have a great group of players coming up,” he says. “That’s a fact. We’re struggling. But if you go a certain direction, you have to see it through to see if it works.”

Is it wishful thinking to believe the USTA can actually produce champions? Lansdorp, for one, believes champions are born, not bred. “I don’t think the USTA has ever done a great job,” he says. “They’ve just been lucky. The basic principle is the same. Every person who has made it in this game, Americans or foreign, it has been the parents who were behind it.”

But there are things the USTA can do better. Bollettieri thinks more emphasis should be placed on sourcing talent in the inner cities.

Though no college player of note, save Laura Granville of Stanford, has hit the pros in recent years, increasingly foreign-dominated college tennis programs still can have an impact.

“For top players, that talent has to be evident from age 15 to 16,” says Stanford women’s head coach Lele Forood. “But to bolster players in the Top 150-200, college tennis still has a role to play.”

Texas’ Patty Fendick-McCain says top juniors don’t compete against one another enough and there should be more eventsfor college players to maintain their rankings. Fendick-McCain says she was able to stay in the Top 100 while playing four years at Stanford (she graduated) by entering seven to 10 events in the summer.

“Now the bulk of events end in July,” says Fendick-McCain, who spent eight years as head coach at the University of Washington before heading to Texas in July.

She also discounts the idea of trying to groom US Open champions, even if that “fuels the game.”

“Have we ever done that?” asks Fendick-McCain, whose husband, Scott McCain, was a High Performance men’s touring pro coach until falling victim to a restructuring and the end of 2002. “No. They happen on their own. The USTA can play a hand, but they don’t develop them. To solely focus on that and ignore the bulk of players who make up the pro tour leaves (those players) feeling isolated.”

Finding that diamond in the rough – let alone making it sparkle – remains a heady challenge, even with a tradition as rich as America’s.

“I expect some criticism the next couple of years unless we get a superstar jumping through the rankings,” Nachand says. “But I’m encouraged because we are putting together a program for now and for the future.”


This is Douglas Robson’s second story in TW’s “Player Development Around the World” series. In the April 19 issue, he examined player development efforts in South America.

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Through this year, Tennis Week is examining the player development efforts of various countries worldwide, including those with a long history of great players and those hoping to establish a tradition that future generations will admire and uphold. This is the eighth installment in the series.

The Long March of Chinese Tennis
On the verge of becoming an economic superpower, is China also destined to be a tennis superpower?
By Suzi Petkovski

Tennis Week print magazine
September 27, 2005
Pgs 68-71

Na Li has long, layered, rock-chick hair and a defiant streak entirely appropriate for a leader of the pack. As the first Chinese winner of a professional title – at Guangzhou last October – Li, 23, is at the vanguard of a Long March by Chinese players that some suggest may even engrave the first Chinese name on a men’s or women’s Grand Slam tournament trophy by 2008. (The first Chinese Grand Slam titlist was Sheng-Nan Shun, who won the 2004 Australian Open junior girls doubles title alongside Taipei’s Yung-Jan Chan.)

Tian-Tian Sun and Ting Li soued the clarion call for Chinese tennis with their surprise gold in the women’s doubles at the Athens Games. Of China’s 32 gold medals in Athens, this was the least expected, the ‘miracle gold’ as it was hailed by the national press. As a sneak preview of the Beijing Olympics, it could not have been scripted better.

Then at Hobart, Australia, in the first week of 2005, Jie Zheng became the second Chinese from the People’s Republic to win a singles title. (Tiawanese Shi-Ting Wang won six titles and ranked as high as No. 26 in the 1990s.) Zheng also swept the doubles with countrywoman Zi Yan. The same week in Sydney, 19-year-old Shuai Peng surged from the qualies to the semis with wins over Anastasia Myskina and Nadia Petrova.

By the time of the Australian Open, excitable types figured China’s future domination of tennis would make the Russian revolution of 2004 look like yesterday’s chop suey.

Well, hold the soy sauce. The Chinese advance since has been steady, rather than explosive. Chinese women have captured or contested singles and doubles titles on four continents – at Hobart, Hyderabad, Estoril, and Rabat – significantly on every surface but grass. In July, a 4-1 defeat of Slovenia in Beijing elevated China’s Fed Cup team to the World Group for the first time. New rankings round was broken when Peng climbed to No. 31 this past August, the highest ranking ever achieved by a mainland Chinese. It came on the back of victories over Elena Dementieva, Dinara Safina, and Kim Clijsters – all in straight sets – at San Diego. Na Li ranked as high as 33 in May, while Zheng has joined them in the top 50.

In the crucible of Grand Slam play, Chinese performances have lagged – Na Li’s third round in the Australian Open the best result in 2005. But the refrain in all conversations (through interpreters) with Chinese players, coaches and press is that pro tennis has a steep learning curve. The official version is that the twin goals of Chinese tennis are experience in the big events and incremental improvement.

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If everyone else got ahead of the score, the measured and modest Chinese did not. “Winning the gold medal does not mean were are No. 1 in the world,” Ting Li explained to her compatriots back in Athens. “We are realistic about the actual position of China’s tennis. Our win today does not mean China has become a major force in tennis.”

Both gold medallists were at pains to point out that the Olympics does not represent the pinnacle of tennis achievement, as not all the top players turn out for the Games, and the doubles event doesn’t even boast the best teams, merely the best teams from each country. (En route to the gold, Li and Sun defeated the American team of Venus Williams and Chanda Rubin, who’d never played together before.)

But success in Athens has certainly stirred visions of glory in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The pressure to win medals at home is palpable. Jin Fang Sun, director of the Chinese Tennis Association (CTA), cracked the whip over her players after the French Open. “We still need to cut the gap with the elite players in terms of training, attitude, mentality, and fitness, and our performances are yet to be consistent,” Sun told the Chinese Sports Daily in June. “China will not stand a big chance of winning gold medals in the Beijing Games if we cannot make a further breakthrough in training and competition in the next three years.”

For all the undoubted benefits the Beijing Olympics have bestowed – funneling aspirations and funds, forcing a professional organization of the game, and providing leverage in lobbying Grand Slam events for wildcards – China’s tennis players are rallying against the odds to produce players.

Long seen as a decadent Western pastime of the royal and ruling classes (although Mao Zedong never let that get in the way of his backhand), tennis lacks deep roots in China. The exception is Hong Kong, home to monied merchants, British expatriates since the 1800s, and the Hong Kong Lawn Tennis Association founded back in 1909. Hong Kong also served as the toehold for pro tennis in China, staging the first sanctioned professional tournament in 1973.

When China regained Hong Kong in 1997 after 150 years of British rule, it adopted the “one country, two systems” policy synthesizing the booming capitalistic and burgeoning socialist economies. This having-it-both-ways strategy is also the core of its tennis developments. Central control is maintained through the national team, gateway to the pro circuit. But much of the player development is funded by entrepreneurial deals with multinational sponsors and agencies, as well as joint ventures with the ITF and the men’s and women’s tours. China has entered into some unlikely doubles partnerships in the name of growing the game.

The China Open in Beijing, though nominally run by the general Administration of Sport (a body of the central government) is 49 percent owned by a Hong Kong-based events company. Dawei Mu, Deputy Director of the Beijing Tennis Association, said before the inaugural China Open in September 2004: “We have learned from the West to set up a company to treat this not as a governmental affair, but as a business affair.”

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