Todd Widom

I have had plenty of parents come to me and tell me they would love their child to play in the Junior Grand Slams. As I have said many times, it all depends on what the goals and aspirations are of that particular player. Being a top ranked ITF junior player does not guarantee anything for the future.

A couple of days ago, I had a discussion with a top college tennis coach saying he was in discussions with a top five ITF ranked junior who would not make his starting lineup, and in fact, based on his UTR rating, would not even be close to making his starting lineup.

This is obviously an extreme case as this college team has a significant amount of superstars that have extensive professional experience. However, I can tell you that it is not uncommon to have a top 20 or 30 ITF ranked junior struggle to make the starting lineup of a high-level Division I college team. They may not even crack the starting lineup at all.

In 2001, I was awarded by the USTA a wildcard for the US Open Juniors main draw via winning the boy’s 18 Clay Courts Super Nationals. After the summer of some national tournaments, I entered the University of Miami as a freshman, and a week later, I was flying to the Big Apple to test my skills at the Junior US Open. It was exciting to be able to test my skills against the world’s best junior players.  In my mind, I was an amateur on a professional track and I got this nice invitation to play a very nice junior event.

There are some things you never forget, like when I was hitting with my coach and a ball from my court went onto the adjacent court where John McEnroe and Pat Cash were playing. I am pretty sure I then developed brown spots on my undies and I was hoping that John was not going to go into a rage of anger that some amateur scrub hit a ball on his court in the middle of his rally. He was nice and gave the ball back. No drama thank goodness.

After a couple of days of practice and getting used to the conditions, I drew an American qualifier first round.  In the first round, I noticed in the warmup that this particular player had a poor backhand so I hit every ball to his backhand and the match was over in under an hour.

The second round was the true test as I was going to face Argentina’s best junior who was ranked number three in the world. I had always admired the Argentines because they were known for producing very disciplined tough competitors much like the players from Spain. I was also trained by two Argentines my whole life, so I knew their philosophy.

There is no secret to why Argentina produces amazing players and also keep in mind that they have very little funds for tennis.  It is a blue-collar mentality of work that the coaches and players bring to the court each day. I ended up losing to this particular player from Argentina in a tough three set match. This player ran all over the globe to achieve this great ranking, and I narrowly lost.

The real question was what could I take from this experience to better my tennis career? It showed me that I was right there with one of the best amateurs in the world and if we were all preparing to have a professional career in tennis, we were all on a similar track regardless of what tournaments we were playing. This experience had no bearing on how good of a player I could become or what I was going to become. This particular Argentine player reached to about 80 on the ATP Tour.

In fact, I played the number two player in the world at the Orange Bowl a couple of months later in Miami after my first semester of college and I took him down a break in the third set. That player made it to top 10 on the ATP Tour.

I have been quite outspoken about what tournaments junior players should be playing and I feel that it all depends on what the goals are for that particular player. There are many players that have achieved these high rankings and play the top junior tennis tournaments all throughout the world. It means they have beaten junior players to achieve their ranking, but many times it has no bearing on how good this player will be in college, and I am not even speaking about professional tennis at this moment.

Many federations like to boast that they have this player ranked this or that, and that they can be this or that on the professional tour. Somehow, they need to justify the money they are spending on this expensive endeavor. It may look good on paper, but it is all about how far a particular player can take their ability and really how far they want to take their ability in regards to whether they end up in college or on the professional tour.

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