The Bollettieri revolution and the spark it ignited in India | Tennis news

Arias headed to Longboat Key, the beach town on Florida’s west coast where the late coach Nick Bollettieri lived. Bollettieri was not a training facility back then. All he had was access to the city’s few courts, a handful of American juniors to train with, and space in his house to house his most accomplished son yet.

Today, that boy is the head of tennis at a sports facility spread over 600 acres and filled with thousands of young trainees, thanks to a pioneering concept known as the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy (NBTA), now IMG Academy.

When the 91-year-old Bollettieri died in early December, Arias touched on Nicks’ influence as a “launch pad” not only to shape the Champions’ career, but to create an entirely new coaching manual that would become a model around the world.

A year after Arias parked himself in the revolutionary coach home, Bollettieri found a 40-acre farm, a $1 million loan from a friend and donations from a few others to start the NBTA in 1978.

I told several families I was opening a school in Sarasota with room and board and tennis. I lined up 20 kids, Bollettieri said in an interview.

He went on to recruit 10 world No. 1s and several top 100 professionals from the Florida-based center, which was the first to offer full-time, live tennis coaching to children alongside an academic curriculum.

Arias, a 1983 US Open singles semifinalist at age 19, was one of the Academy’s early success stories before Andre Agassi and Jim Courier enrolled as juniors.

Boris Becker would also be number one among the early birds, a list that swelled as the academy spread: Monica Seles, Martina Hingis, Marcelo Rios, Jelena Jankovic, Maria Sharapova and the Williams sisters Serena and Venus all worked with Bollettieri. .

Equally important were the countless others who made the academy their home, rubbing shoulders with the crme de la crme, learning tennis skills and life values ​​in the environment created by the former paratrooper.

Nick leveled the tennis world in a very Darwinian way, four-time Grand Slam champion Courier told ESPN in 2014. He assembled an ecosystem of the world’s best juniors and sprinkled in professionals as well. He created an industry.

One that became the blueprint for tennis academies worldwide. The Rafa Nadal Academy and the Mouratoglou Tennis Academy, two of the preeminent modern tennis coaching institutions in the world, are modeled after the NBTA and offer accommodation and schooling on campus.

Modeled in India

So, to some extent, was an academy set up in India in 1985, the Britannia Amritraj Tennis (BAT) Foundation in Chennai.

We used to see Nick quite a lot at the track. We knew Andre (Agassi) very well and we knew what Nick had been doing for almost 20 years, Anand Amritraj, former world number 74 and one of the people behind the BAT concept with brother Vijay and mother Maggie, said. phone from Los Angeles.

He basically invented this whole live-in academy system. After Nick set up his business in Florida, we copied it, although not quite. But our BAT is certainly modeled after it.

However, BAT’s aim was different from the factory Bollettieris academy, which had then changed (in 1987 it was sold to IMG, while Bollettieri continued as coach). With the idea of ​​finding and grooming the next Davis Cup players from India, the Amritrajs set up an Academy on the school premises, selected eight boys from the first batch and stayed with that number for years.

Anand played a key role in that scouting system. Our first choice was Rohit Rajpal (current Davis Cup captain). We tried to choose boys between 11 and 14. In 1986, my first choice was Leander (Paes), he said of the academy that also gave Indian tennis the likes of Gaurav Natekar and Somdev Devvarman.

On average, the Academy replaced two boys each year, with the other six remaining the same. That’s where BAT overlapped with NBTA in concept and creation, being the first of its kind in Asia to have residential facilities, as Vijay, a former world No. 18, would say.

From practice fields to coaching, from accommodation to tournaments, from food to training – everything was taken care of. It was not a short-term commitment, Rajpal and Paes stayed there for four years, Natekar for five. While Vijay and Anand set up the shop and brought in sponsorship, Maggie, the driving force behind her sons’ tennis careers, ran the whole thing personally. The only interest, like Bollettieri’s, was to produce top-class professionals.

He treated those eight boys like he treated us, Anand said. We selected the best eight kids, brought them to Chennai and gave them the best possible support in tennis and education. We had two American coaches who came. The children attended the best school in Madras. We set up an apartment where the boys stayed in four rooms. Their food, nutrition, domestic and international tournaments, everything was taken care of.

In India, it was by far the most successful system, giving India future Davis Cup stars. That was the idea behind it, and Nicks Academy was the plan.

After running this system for nearly two decades, BAT ceased operations in 2003. The economy became increasingly struggling after British sponsorship ended. Therein lies the sustainability hurdle for such a concept, which Bollettieri managed to navigate for decades with the help of IMG.

Finance, and you have to have someone as involved as my mother whose only interest was to produce top-class tennis players,” Anand said of the challenges of academies like BAT, which run a long competition. Unless you have all those pieces together, it’s not going to happen.

It has not happened in India since then. Something like this (a state-of-the-art live academy) would make a big difference (in Indian tennis),” Anand said. But a lot of pieces have to fall into place for that.

And that’s the hardest part of the groundbreaking tennis coaching system that Bollettieri seamlessly paved the way for.

It’s not easy to replicate that, Anand said.