today's video is dedicated to all the tennis parents that watch my content and i want to answer
a very interesting question that gets brought up all the time when i talk to tennis parents when i
also talk to other tennis coaches and that is the question whether tennis academies are a scam and
what i mean by scam but basically are these tennis academies being dishonest are they promising
things like a pro career or a division one scholarship to students when they know that these
students have absolutely no chance of achieving these things and they take their parents money
when they exactly know that there's no chance in a million years that some of these students
are going to be able to achieve these things and they promise these things to the parents anyway
that would be dishonest and you could call that a scam now there's absolutely no way for me to know
whether tennis academies do this or not i tend to believe that everybody is in the business of
coaching tennis with honest intentions i know i am i am very honest with all my students i tell
them exactly how it is but i also understand that sometimes honesty can lead to less income it can
lead to people taking less lessons and playing tennis a lot less so often when i'm honest
it goes against my best interest but i don't care because i'm in this game for the right
reasons i don't care about the money i have enough students where me being honest is not
really going to hurt my income that much so again it's absolutely impossible for me to know whether
tennis academies are operating honestly or not i'm sure there's some who are dishonest with their
clients but i'm also sure that the vast majority of the tennis academies are operating in the most
honest way but before we get into my opinion on tennis academy and i used to have a tennis
academy myself so i can speak from experience i want to first explain to all you guys that are
beginners who are watching my channel who might not know what a tennis academy is so basically
nick bolletieri was the first one who created a tennis academy in florida and what a tennis
academy is is designed to bring the best juniors maybe of the nation or internationally to one
place where they can train with each other and they also happen to live there on campus and it's
an environment created to give these players the best chance of advancing in the game of tennis and
they also will do their schooling at the academy that's basically what a tennis academy is now
there's different versions of it actually the vast majority of tennis academies don't provide
housing so it will be an academy where local kids from that area will come maybe in the mornings if
they're homeschooled or in the afternoons and train there and the best academies in the world
your guys all know what those are i need to mention them here they usually have the whole
package and they also tend to attract the absolute best juniors in the world so i'm going to tell
you one story that's going to explain the negative aspect of a tennis academy and there was these two
junior players who have moved to the united states from brazil and they went to a very famous
academy and after two years of that academy where their entire family moved there they even bought
a house there they had enough because the dad saw that the kids just weren't improving and what they
did was they moved to a different part of the state and they started taking lessons with me
and to my shock when i started training these boys they were serving with a forehand grip and they
had many other catastrophic technical flaws that weren't corrected in two years at this very famous
academy so you ask yourself how is this possible well it's very common actually because you gotta
think of it this way the tennis academy doesn't necessarily make their money from the best
players but they need to attract the absolute best players so they can use those players
for marketing to attract other players to come there so it's all about having as many players
as possible now most of the players at an academy are actually going to be either intermediate level
and some will actually be low level so it is perfectly understandable that
an intermediate level junior player is not going to get to practice with a high level junior player
or an elite level junior player they are probably going to be putting groups where they're going to
practice with each other and that is also true for the low level junior players they are not going to
get to play against the intermediates they're going to be stuck in their low-level group now
for you guys that don't know i completely stopped giving group lessons i only do one-on-one private
coaching why because it's the only way to make technical adjustments on the strokes when there's
four people or more on the court it becomes very difficult to give each person enough individual
attention so that strokes can improve for that reason i stopped giving group lessons i only do
private lessons because this is where my work can be the most valuable i see the best results
when i work with someone one-on-one and the same is true in an academy if you have a lot of kids on
the court it's going to be very difficult for the coach to make technical adjustments having said
that even within a group setting fundamental technical adjustments need to be made so what
happens sometimes is that the coaching staff that will teach the low level or the intermediate
type of junior playstation academy is let's face it unqualified and low paid they don't
get paid a lot and these are not going to be high quality coaches who are going to be teaching these
beginner level kids or intermediate level kids even at very famous academies now this is true for
every academy of course not i don't want to sit here and generalize and saying this is true for
every academy i'm sure there's a lot of academies out there where they have very qualified staff
across all levels i've seen it here in southeast florida there's some great academies down here
but it is undeniable fact that everybody knows that some academies where you have
tons of students that some of the coaching staff especially for the low
level students is not very good and they're also low paid so it's understandable that these two
boys came here with the promise of achieving a division one scholarship or a professional
career and after two years of hard training they still had catastrophic fundamental flaws on their
strokes so you're probably thinking now this video is going to be all about slamming tennis academies
and it's absolutely not because tennis academies are necessary in developing professional level
players and before i explain why this is the case i want to tell you a little story about myself
so i was a high level junior player in germany i was ranked in the top 20 number 17 in the nation
i was at a good level and when i was 16 i had my best year i had won three tournaments in a row
and my dad knew nikki pillage for you guys that don't know nikki pilic is one of the most famous
coaches in the world he was a davis cup champion with three different countries germany croatia and
serbia also was a player who was ranked as high as number four in the world and was a finalist
at the french open now he's from the town of split and i am from the town of split as well and my dad
knew him so he had a connection with nikki pilic and he was able to arrange so that i go
to the nikki pilic academy in munich and guess who was at the nikki pilic academy in munich
novak djokovic of course not at the time where i would have gone there djokovic is a lot younger than
me but i had a chance to go to the nikki pilic tennis academy and i refused to go because i was a
little bit of a mama's boy okay and i didn't want to go to munich because that was eight hours away
and i decided against it and i stayed in this small town in germany where i continued to train
i can tell you that that was one of the biggest mistakes that i ever did why because i was not
only the best player in my club but i was on one of the best players in an entire county and i was
among the best players in the whole state where i was living so the fact that i stayed at this
club halted my improvement if i would have gone in munich i would have played with players who were
much better than me not only from germany but from all across europe and naturally my level
would have gone up with better competition so the great thing about tennis academies is that you get
a lot of high level or elite level junior players at one place and let's say you're a tennis parent
and your kid is dominating the area where you live there's absolutely nobody else for you to play
against because your kid is destroying everyone or it's going to be unbelievably helpful if you
go to an academy where the level is high enough where your kid gets challenged and gets to face
better competition on a daily basis and that is exactly what happened at bolletieri he had the
best of the best from all over the world you had agassi courier monica seles and the list
goes on and on and all these players were pushing each other at the academy and they maximized their
potential for that reason and possibly the most valuable aspect of training at a tennis academy
is the mindset that the players and the coaches have at the academy now let me explain that in
a little more detail when i grew up in germany playing junior tennis i only had one goal in mind
and that was to play professional tennis i didn't really have any backup plan i didn't plan to go to
college or to do anything else except tennis i wanted to be a professional player however
many of the juniors that i was training with who were at my level didn't
have those same goals they possibly knew that the chances of making it on a professional tour
are like winning the lottery and these friends of mine had goals to go to college to become doctors
lawyers engineers businessmen and they had absolutely no interest in pursuing a professional
career and that is a very important value of going to a tennis academy because when you don't have
players in your local area around that have the same goals as you you feel as if you're doing
something wrong you don't feel that you have a sense of purpose and when you go to an academy
you're going to have players there and coaches who are going to be fully supporting you with your
goal because they have the same goals in mind the coaches wholeheartedly want you to make it on the
professional tour and the other players who are at the academy share the same goals as you and you
feel a sense of purpose because of that reason so it's incredibly important for a junior player who
wants to get a division 1 scholarship or even pursue a professional career to be surrounded
with other players who have the same goals but also have a coaching staff that fully supports the
goals that the players have but here's the problem that a lot of parents run into they will send
their kids off to an academy when the kids are at let's say beginner level very low level
or even at the intermediate level and they expect that the academy will transform their kids into
division one players or even professional players and one thing you have to understand about tennis
academies is that when you see elite level players at an academy or high level players is that these
players didn't get developed at the academy they follow the right steps in tennis they start playing
locally at their club and they train a tremendous amount with the local coaches or sometimes their
parents and they get to a certain level and they keep advancing so that naturally they seek
out an academy because they don't have a lot of competition in the area that they're at so in the
vast majority of the cases when you see an elite level player at an academy or a high level player
those players were developed prior to going to an academy and listen i'm well aware that
academies will take credit for these players and they deserve some of the credit as i mentioned
earlier academies are absolutely essential when it comes to building professional players but fact is
that rarely players get developed from scratch at an academy i'm sure it happens sometimes but all
the players that you know that went to academy all the elite superstar players that were at famous
academies they were all developed prior to going to an academy so if you're a tennis parent ready
to send your kid off to an academy expecting a division one scholarship or a professional
career you got to realize that if your kid is at a low level if your kid is at an intermediate
level even if there's plenty of competition at your local club it makes absolutely no sense
to go to an academy when the time comes where your kid is destroying everyone in your area you might
have to seek out an academy where you're going to get higher competition and your kid is going to
improve their tennis tremendously because of that if you have the expectations of sending your
kids off and expecting the academy to develop your kids from scratch that often never happens