“We were juniors”: Training Young Tennis Players in America and Russia
Individualism and rigor in training elite junior players
Onstage at Lantern Theater Company November 7 December 15, 2019, The Last Match by Anna Ziegler highlights two elite tennis players battling in the U.S. Open semifinals. One is an American golden boy; the other is a Russian upstart. Their temperaments and approach to the game are very different — as are the typical training regimens for players from their home countries.
Both the play’s competing characters — American Tim Porter and Russian Sergei Sergeyev — played on the junior tour. A junior is a competitive tennis player aged 18 and under. Like their professional adult counterparts, junior players compete in regional, national, and sometimes international tournaments, gathering points based on their performance to determine their rankings. The higher the ranking, the better opportunity a junior player has to earn a college scholarship, at least in the United States.
Higher education is not the only goal, though: some elite juniors start playing in the adult tournaments early. There are limits on the number of these competitions a junior can enter each year, based on their age, but especially talented 15, 16, and 17-year-olds can turn up on major professional courts — and even win. And the best of these players, including Serena Williams, Venus Williams, Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras, and others, often forgo college altogether to turn pro.
Tim Porter, the American champion in The Last Match, came up through the American training system, which focuses on the needs of the individual player in order to unlock their full potential.
A major question American juniors must face is how to balance training, competition, and schoolwork. Some players continue to attend brick-and-mortar schools and accommodate their training and competitions around their school schedule. For some, this is helpful — the relative normalcy of their school experience helps keep tennis in perspective and staves off burnout. For others, though, the hours off the court demanded by a typical school schedule divide their focus and allow their peers to get ahead of the competition.
For American players who choose to forgo the typical school experience, there are options that allow them to continue an education while pursuing their training. They can be home-schooled, allowing maximum flexibility for tennis training, or they can attend a tennis academy that also offers an academic component. It all comes down to the individual player, their family, and their coach.
Historically, the Russian approach to training is quite different. The state paid for tennis training during the later days of the Soviet Union, creating an academy system with large groups of children — starting as young as four — training for hours a day. These large groups, sponsored by various elements of Russian government, meant a wider talent pool and more competition.
According to Shamil Tarpishev, former head of the Russian Tennis Federation, “I think that in the West the coaches are more like partners or counselors to the players. It’s often up to the individual what you do. But Russian people need to be forced into training.” The former academy system, vestiges of which survive today in the coaching style if not in the size of the classes, meant drilling children from a very young age, without accounting for individual differences.
For Russian juniors, there is much less concern about balancing life and sport. According to Tarpishev, “The age of seven to nine is the best time for developing speed of reaction. But once you have missed the boat, the person you train will never play fast enough and it’s the most important thing to work on their shortcomings before the age of 12. With all the temptations of the modern world we rarely have ideal children.” It also meant a focus on the collective rather than the individual that extended into adulthood: for many years, professional Russians players were not permitted to keep their prize money, but instead turned it over to the state.
But despite the popularity of the sport in Russia, the demise of the state sponsorship means that lessons are expensive, limiting the participation of poorer players, and decreasing the funding the academies receive. This leads to court disrepair, and elite players now often leave for training — as Sergei does in The Last Match — to access better facilities internationally. This can lead to both greater success and alienation, as Russians trained in Russia sometimes distrust Russians who left to seek training elsewhere. Sergei, who left Russia to train in Italy, France, and America, expresses this detachment in the play, saying he has “no home. Except for this game.”
Whether coming up through the American or Russian systems, whether taught at an academy or one-on-one with a coach, elite junior players have one other thing in common: the lonely and potentially isolating travel. Junior tournaments do not pay prize money, and so it is common for juniors to travel alone, rather than with their family, to keep costs down. Even as adults, Tim and Sergei — from different generations, different sides of the world, and different training philosophies — have in common a desire for their parents to see them play, and a knowledge that they cannot rely on that to happen.
The Last Match is onstage at the Lantern November 7 through December 15, 2019. Visit our website for tickets and information.
