Before you send your kid to a tennis academy, just ask yourself, why? Why does your tennis player need a tennis academy? I guess these are some possibilities:

1. The player is really gifted by nature. He is born for tennis. His results are some of the best in his age division in the country and he definitely needs to have a highly qualified tennis coach and fitness trainer. He and his family want to see him become top 10 in the world.
2. The player is pretty good. He likes to play tennis and has good results. Both he and you dream about a professional career.
3. The kid likes to play and asks you to send him to a tennis academy (actually he just wants to leave the house and his parents). He is a teenager and you are glad to send him away.

If you have a kid who’s really good, then many tennis academies will accept him for free or give you a significant discount. Any tennis academy needs some stars, and it is much easier to simply attract a star rather than develop one from a beginner.

If your kid is not a star, there is no reason to pay huge amounts of money for a famous brand. The chances that an average player will develop into a star are very small.

Many tennis academies are like a pyramid. It needs money to train some talented kids for free or give them a discount and then use them for promotion. Average players are the main source of money. Any academy has a couple of stars, a small group of pretty strong players and many regular kids.

Many, not all, academies are not interested in the development of champions. They are businesses and they act according to business logic. Demand is still higher than supply on the market. Look at statistics – only individual programs (they may be at an academy also) with a private coach produce professional players.

How do you find the right tennis academy for your kid? The main rule is to choose a coach who will be responsible for your kid’s development. Look at some tennis academies’ websites, you can easily find the names of one or two coaches, but what about the other ones? Why aren’t they represented on the website? Often, the secret is very simple: there are no constant coaches.

One more important thing. Look on the Internet and figure out which academies advertise themselves in a very aggressive manner. Ask yourself, if a tennis academy is really good, why does it spend so much money for advertisement? An academy has a fixed number of courts and a constant tennis team. If it continues to attract new players, how can they keep high quality?

Something is wrong with that, right? OK, just relax. They have their own business model: aggressive advertisement attracts new clients (players), so it is not very important for them to keep high quality. New clients always come, while the old ones leave. I call this business model “the leaky bucket.” The quantity of incoming clients is the same as the number of clients who are leaving, thanks to advertisement.

My advice: never call an academy that places paid advertisement on each page of the Internet. Really great academies have good coaches who are not worried about spending a lot of money for promotion.

After you choose an academy, visit it and talk to some parents whose kids play there. Read the contract very carefully. If the management promises you that ratio of the coaches to players on the court is 1 to 4, ask them to add this to the contract. Always bargain, you can save money. Ask an assigned coach about a player development plan. Do not pay money in advance for sessions that will last for a long time, because if you decide to take your tennis player away from the academy, it will be difficult to get your money back.

Look closely for tennis academies that were founded by really good coaches with a proven successful record. Be careful with academies founded by businessmen.

Remember that one of the most famous tennis coaches Robert Lansdorp is not sold on academies, although he does concede their value as far as practice and competition, and had kind words for the atmosphere and opportunities at Bollettieri’s. He was very critical of all the “academies” that start as a coach and one or two good players and then suddenly have 30 juniors of varying levels doing nothing but drilling.

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