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ROME — Nearly 50 American tennis players will descend on Rome this week for the Italian Open, the signature tournament for a country whose recent success in developing talent has become an inspiration for the rest of the world — especially the U.S..
Italian tennis has been punching far above its weight lately, producing the country’s first world No. 1 in Jannik Sinner and a bevy of young talent, despite operating with far less money and less than 20 percent of America’s population. So when the U.S. Tennis Association (USTA) embarked on a reorganization of its player development system, its leaders put the Italian Tennis Federation (FITP) under a microscope to try to figure out the ingredients and recipe for their secret sauce.
Everyone in the sport watched the past 10 years as Italy added a slew of lower-level professional tournaments, giving its players far more local opportunities to compete without frittering money and time on travel. It built more hard courts to prepare its talents for a circuit that plays on them more than any other surface. It decentralized its high-performance structure, to improve coaching continuity as talented juniors become talented adult professionals. It has reaped the rewards: there are nine Italians in the ATP top 100 and three in the WTA top 100, two in the men’s top 10 and one in the women’s.
“They heavily go strong on sports science support between 15, 16, and 17,” Tracy Davies, a longtime USTA executive who recently became the general manager of USA Tennis, the organization’s newly created high-performance division, said in an interview.
“They’re making sure the kids have the best in athletic development, making sure they have the best mental training, that they have all the data they need every single match they play.”
Italy’s rewards have even extended to adding a top American talent to its ranks. Tyra Grant, a rising figure in the women’s game with an American father and Italian mother, in April decided to switch to . Grant, 17, was born and raised in Italy, but had spent significant time in the U.S. through her childhood and much of the past 18 months of her professional development using the national USTA campus in Orlando, Fla. as her home base.
During a roundtable in Rome, Grant said that she switched because she had more of an affinity with Italy.
“I feel mostly Italian. Even though I’m half and half, I think I’m more connected to the Italian part,” she said at the Foro Italico.
“I was born here and I grew up here and my friends are here. I feel more connected to the Italian culture and feel more home here.”
Nearly 20 years ago, when a golden generation of Spanish players dominated the top of men’s tennis, the United States Tennis Association built a player development system based on the Spanish machine.
Now the U.S. wants to be Italy.
The U.S. player development program has not exactly been a flop. Since 2008, the last time the organization restructured, it has produced 23 junior Grand Slam champions, but winning adult titles is the real measure of success. American women have been winning Grand Slam titles for decades, and while Andy Roddick’s 2003 U.S. Open remains the most recent on the men’s side, the U.S. has achieved the kind of depth at the top of the ATP Tour that it hadn’t seen since the 1990s.
There are four American women in the WTA top 10 and four American men in the ATP top 16. Madison Keys won the Australian Open just this year; Taylor Fritz and Jessica Pegula reached the U.S. Open singles finals in 2024. But for years now on the men’s side, only unicorns with the rarest of innate tennis gifts have been reaching that lofty plateau of Grand Slam champion. Keys was touted as a multiple-major winner before she was 18. She proved to be an overnight success story 16 years in the making.
The question now is whether Davies and her team at the USTA can incorporate the Italian formula for success into the sprawling organism of American tennis. Lew Sherr, who became USTA chief executive three years ago, had not planned on restructuring a player development program that had enjoyed significant success. When the Covid-19 pandemic brought a few lean years to the world’s most profitable tennis federation, Sherr focused on maintaining, and then growing participation as opposed to elite performance coaching. The USTA cut funding for camp programs and reduced the number of national team coaches from 24 to 11.
Then the man who orchestrated much of that successful player development program during the past 15 years decided to weigh in.
Jose Higueras, who coached Jim Courier and Roger Federer at their pinnacles, led the player development program at the USTA from 2008 to 2014 and served as a consultant for several years after that. He watched with a combination of fear and anger as the organization cut back on elite coaching and training for rising juniors.
In March of last year, he circulated a letter to leaders in the American tennis community.
“The current leadership has veered off course, deliberately cutting funding and staffing for the Team USA pathway and American players, while they waste millions of dollars on boondoggles like unnecessary building renovations at the USTA Campus in Lake Nona and a million-dollar holiday party.
“If the decisions of the past four years are not reversed soon, in ten years, American Tennis will be irrelevant on the world stage,” Higueras wrote.
Brian Vahaly, a former professional who took over as president of the USTA in January, said in an interview in April that creating a new generation of stars and growing participation are not mutually exclusive missions.
“American success is incredibly important to us getting there,” Vahaly said.
Stars, he said, make television ratings spike and inspire kids to play, just as he was inspired as a child by meeting Michael Chang. This is the phenomenon that Italy is seeing with Sinner, who has become the male sporting icon in a country that, for so many years, was one of the most dominant soccer nations in the world. As that dominance has waned and Italian tennis has risen, Sinner has become its celebrity. Children see him and want to be him.
“We are seeing tremendous demand in our sport and that’s coinciding at a time when we have a really large amount of top 100 players that are Americans,” Vahaly said. “It’s a key driver.”
Sherr said that after reading Higueras’ letter, he made a decision to be “much more directly involved with our player development efforts and organization.” He came to realize that each high-performance division — from strength and conditioning, to data analysis, to tournament organization — had its own budget and had to advocate for itself. Everything was siloed. There was no unifying force or strategy.
Davies, a former player for the University of Tennessee, has the job of being that unifier. USA Tennis now includes everything from player development to junior competitions, international team events and managing all professional tournaments other than the U.S. Open — all with one eye across the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean.
“You look to learn from countries like Italy and others that are finding success,” said Vahaly.
“We’d be crazy not to learn from other countries and what they’re doing really well.”
At the top of the list was adding more second- and third-tier tournaments, as the Italians had done. The U.S. will host 130 such events this year. Last year there were about 110 but many were — and still are — at the lower end on the International Tennis Federation (ITF) circuit. Those events are useful for the most elite juniors, like 17-year-old American Iva Jovic, who won her first title on that circuit when she was 14 and has since won main-draw matches at Grand Slams.
But it’s the ATP Challenger and WTA 125 circuits, which are the second tiers of professional tennis, that truly mould players. At the highest level, more and more ATP and WTA 1,000 events (one rung below a Grand Slam) now run for a fortnight. That leaves a lot of losers hanging around with a week or more to kill, and a good deal of them enter Challenger and WTA 125 events to get some reps.
Four-time Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka played a WTA 125 event in France in early May. In the same week the Estoril Open in Portugal, which is in the highest ATP Challenger tier, had several top-30 players in the draw. Being able to get that kind of experience on home soil, without the costs of international travel and accommodation, is invaluable to rising players.
The USTA, which provides about $10 million in subsidies at these professional events, mostly for prize money, is pushing to add more events at the higher end of those tiers, targeting as much as an annual 30 percent increase. Tournaments with more prize money and points are more attractive to better competition; investing in domestic events may be a more efficient use of money than paying for a handful of top players and coaches to travel to Europe for tournaments. Davies wants to do a better job of scheduling the events and clustering them geographically to make them more accessible to more players.
Same goes for elite junior events. The U.S. is home to some 14,000 junior tournaments, more than any other country. Davies said she leans regularly on the advice of the captains of the Billie Jean King and Davis Cup teams, Lindsay Davenport and Bob Bryan. Both won their share of Grand Slam titles and gold medals and reached No. 1 in their world rankings.
Both also have talented tennis-playing children. Davenport’s son, Jagger Leach, won the boys’ singles title at Indian Wells in March and plans to attend Texas Christian University, the program that nurtured British players Cameron Norrie and Jacob Fearnley.
Leach had a rather rarefied tennis childhood, with a mother who is a former world No. 1 and a father who was an All-American at the University of Southern California. Still, Davenport told Davies that her son might have benefitted from having more consistent coaching in USTA programs. Like most tennis federations, the USTA generally has coaches who work with younger players, and then others who take them on as they progress through their teenage years.
Italy went the other way, introducing a network of regional performance centers to offer local resource while keeping players in the same environment, and with the same coaches, for as long as possible. Sinner’s formative years were not in an FITP center, but at a private academy, the Piatti Tennis Center in Bordighera. The FITP instead focused on infrastructure at the national level, from data to sports psychology, just as the USTA’S USA Tennis initiative intends to do now.
The organization has Larry Lauer, a longtime sports psychologist, leading its mental skills department. Lauer often speaks to developing players and parents at national and regional camps and through webinars.
Players have been hiring their own mental performance coaches at younger ages, but there are a lot of talented players at the lower end of the income scale who can’t afford that. Davies said that’s a solvable problem, in addition to building awareness and access to mental health professionals who have nothing to do with sports psychology or high performance.
“Just going back and continuing to remind ourselves, it’s not about me, you know, or anyone, or what their past results are playing,” Davies said. “It’s really about the players and where they are now and what we can do to support them.”
If there is an irony in all this, it’s that one of Italy’s most important innovations is right in the U.S. tennis wheelhouse. Its hard-court drive produced the male success story that predates Sinner: Matteo Berrettini, who reached the Wimbledon final in 2021 and has the booming serve and forehand of the male American tennis archetype. Sinner has followed him and transfigured men’s tennis into a game of attack or be attacked from anywhere in the court, alongside Carlos Alcaraz, his biggest rival.
But in that fallow period for male American Grand Slam champions since Roddick, clay-court skills — use of angles over linear ballstriking, variety, lateral movement and rally tolerance — defined the evolution in men’s tennis. Italy’s hard-court boom may yet create a best-of-both worlds training environment, but the U.S. tennis landscape is yet to embrace a similar hybridity.
The USTA doesn’t have to lift a finger to get players hard-court experience, since those courts dominate American tennis. The clay experience, specifically the red clay experience, which they know from experience can be so helpful, is always a work in progress, because there just isn’t all that much of it in America. The better players can find it at the Orlando training center and other select locations. Many others have to use green clay as a substitute. It’s not a great one, since sliding and ball movement is different on that surface, but it’s something, and it’s prevalent, especially in Florida.
Higueras, who lives on a ranch in Palm Springs, Calif., said he wasn’t consulted on any of the changes. Reached last week and informed that the letter had caused Sherr to focus more heavily on player development, Higueras was magnanimous.
“I wish them all the best,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Sports Business, Tennis, Women's Tennis
2025 The Athletic Media Company
Continue reading...
Italian tennis has been punching far above its weight lately, producing the country’s first world No. 1 in Jannik Sinner and a bevy of young talent, despite operating with far less money and less than 20 percent of America’s population. So when the U.S. Tennis Association (USTA) embarked on a reorganization of its player development system, its leaders put the Italian Tennis Federation (FITP) under a microscope to try to figure out the ingredients and recipe for their secret sauce.
Everyone in the sport watched the past 10 years as Italy added a slew of lower-level professional tournaments, giving its players far more local opportunities to compete without frittering money and time on travel. It built more hard courts to prepare its talents for a circuit that plays on them more than any other surface. It decentralized its high-performance structure, to improve coaching continuity as talented juniors become talented adult professionals. It has reaped the rewards: there are nine Italians in the ATP top 100 and three in the WTA top 100, two in the men’s top 10 and one in the women’s.
“They heavily go strong on sports science support between 15, 16, and 17,” Tracy Davies, a longtime USTA executive who recently became the general manager of USA Tennis, the organization’s newly created high-performance division, said in an interview.
“They’re making sure the kids have the best in athletic development, making sure they have the best mental training, that they have all the data they need every single match they play.”
Italy’s rewards have even extended to adding a top American talent to its ranks. Tyra Grant, a rising figure in the women’s game with an American father and Italian mother, in April decided to switch to . Grant, 17, was born and raised in Italy, but had spent significant time in the U.S. through her childhood and much of the past 18 months of her professional development using the national USTA campus in Orlando, Fla. as her home base.
During a roundtable in Rome, Grant said that she switched because she had more of an affinity with Italy.
“I feel mostly Italian. Even though I’m half and half, I think I’m more connected to the Italian part,” she said at the Foro Italico.
“I was born here and I grew up here and my friends are here. I feel more connected to the Italian culture and feel more home here.”
Nearly 20 years ago, when a golden generation of Spanish players dominated the top of men’s tennis, the United States Tennis Association built a player development system based on the Spanish machine.
Now the U.S. wants to be Italy.
The U.S. player development program has not exactly been a flop. Since 2008, the last time the organization restructured, it has produced 23 junior Grand Slam champions, but winning adult titles is the real measure of success. American women have been winning Grand Slam titles for decades, and while Andy Roddick’s 2003 U.S. Open remains the most recent on the men’s side, the U.S. has achieved the kind of depth at the top of the ATP Tour that it hadn’t seen since the 1990s.
There are four American women in the WTA top 10 and four American men in the ATP top 16. Madison Keys won the Australian Open just this year; Taylor Fritz and Jessica Pegula reached the U.S. Open singles finals in 2024. But for years now on the men’s side, only unicorns with the rarest of innate tennis gifts have been reaching that lofty plateau of Grand Slam champion. Keys was touted as a multiple-major winner before she was 18. She proved to be an overnight success story 16 years in the making.
The question now is whether Davies and her team at the USTA can incorporate the Italian formula for success into the sprawling organism of American tennis. Lew Sherr, who became USTA chief executive three years ago, had not planned on restructuring a player development program that had enjoyed significant success. When the Covid-19 pandemic brought a few lean years to the world’s most profitable tennis federation, Sherr focused on maintaining, and then growing participation as opposed to elite performance coaching. The USTA cut funding for camp programs and reduced the number of national team coaches from 24 to 11.
Then the man who orchestrated much of that successful player development program during the past 15 years decided to weigh in.
Jose Higueras, who coached Jim Courier and Roger Federer at their pinnacles, led the player development program at the USTA from 2008 to 2014 and served as a consultant for several years after that. He watched with a combination of fear and anger as the organization cut back on elite coaching and training for rising juniors.
In March of last year, he circulated a letter to leaders in the American tennis community.
“The current leadership has veered off course, deliberately cutting funding and staffing for the Team USA pathway and American players, while they waste millions of dollars on boondoggles like unnecessary building renovations at the USTA Campus in Lake Nona and a million-dollar holiday party.
“If the decisions of the past four years are not reversed soon, in ten years, American Tennis will be irrelevant on the world stage,” Higueras wrote.
Brian Vahaly, a former professional who took over as president of the USTA in January, said in an interview in April that creating a new generation of stars and growing participation are not mutually exclusive missions.
“American success is incredibly important to us getting there,” Vahaly said.
Stars, he said, make television ratings spike and inspire kids to play, just as he was inspired as a child by meeting Michael Chang. This is the phenomenon that Italy is seeing with Sinner, who has become the male sporting icon in a country that, for so many years, was one of the most dominant soccer nations in the world. As that dominance has waned and Italian tennis has risen, Sinner has become its celebrity. Children see him and want to be him.
“We are seeing tremendous demand in our sport and that’s coinciding at a time when we have a really large amount of top 100 players that are Americans,” Vahaly said. “It’s a key driver.”
Sherr said that after reading Higueras’ letter, he made a decision to be “much more directly involved with our player development efforts and organization.” He came to realize that each high-performance division — from strength and conditioning, to data analysis, to tournament organization — had its own budget and had to advocate for itself. Everything was siloed. There was no unifying force or strategy.
Davies, a former player for the University of Tennessee, has the job of being that unifier. USA Tennis now includes everything from player development to junior competitions, international team events and managing all professional tournaments other than the U.S. Open — all with one eye across the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean.
“You look to learn from countries like Italy and others that are finding success,” said Vahaly.
“We’d be crazy not to learn from other countries and what they’re doing really well.”
At the top of the list was adding more second- and third-tier tournaments, as the Italians had done. The U.S. will host 130 such events this year. Last year there were about 110 but many were — and still are — at the lower end on the International Tennis Federation (ITF) circuit. Those events are useful for the most elite juniors, like 17-year-old American Iva Jovic, who won her first title on that circuit when she was 14 and has since won main-draw matches at Grand Slams.
But it’s the ATP Challenger and WTA 125 circuits, which are the second tiers of professional tennis, that truly mould players. At the highest level, more and more ATP and WTA 1,000 events (one rung below a Grand Slam) now run for a fortnight. That leaves a lot of losers hanging around with a week or more to kill, and a good deal of them enter Challenger and WTA 125 events to get some reps.
Four-time Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka played a WTA 125 event in France in early May. In the same week the Estoril Open in Portugal, which is in the highest ATP Challenger tier, had several top-30 players in the draw. Being able to get that kind of experience on home soil, without the costs of international travel and accommodation, is invaluable to rising players.
The USTA, which provides about $10 million in subsidies at these professional events, mostly for prize money, is pushing to add more events at the higher end of those tiers, targeting as much as an annual 30 percent increase. Tournaments with more prize money and points are more attractive to better competition; investing in domestic events may be a more efficient use of money than paying for a handful of top players and coaches to travel to Europe for tournaments. Davies wants to do a better job of scheduling the events and clustering them geographically to make them more accessible to more players.
Same goes for elite junior events. The U.S. is home to some 14,000 junior tournaments, more than any other country. Davies said she leans regularly on the advice of the captains of the Billie Jean King and Davis Cup teams, Lindsay Davenport and Bob Bryan. Both won their share of Grand Slam titles and gold medals and reached No. 1 in their world rankings.
Both also have talented tennis-playing children. Davenport’s son, Jagger Leach, won the boys’ singles title at Indian Wells in March and plans to attend Texas Christian University, the program that nurtured British players Cameron Norrie and Jacob Fearnley.
Leach had a rather rarefied tennis childhood, with a mother who is a former world No. 1 and a father who was an All-American at the University of Southern California. Still, Davenport told Davies that her son might have benefitted from having more consistent coaching in USTA programs. Like most tennis federations, the USTA generally has coaches who work with younger players, and then others who take them on as they progress through their teenage years.
Italy went the other way, introducing a network of regional performance centers to offer local resource while keeping players in the same environment, and with the same coaches, for as long as possible. Sinner’s formative years were not in an FITP center, but at a private academy, the Piatti Tennis Center in Bordighera. The FITP instead focused on infrastructure at the national level, from data to sports psychology, just as the USTA’S USA Tennis initiative intends to do now.
The organization has Larry Lauer, a longtime sports psychologist, leading its mental skills department. Lauer often speaks to developing players and parents at national and regional camps and through webinars.
Players have been hiring their own mental performance coaches at younger ages, but there are a lot of talented players at the lower end of the income scale who can’t afford that. Davies said that’s a solvable problem, in addition to building awareness and access to mental health professionals who have nothing to do with sports psychology or high performance.
“Just going back and continuing to remind ourselves, it’s not about me, you know, or anyone, or what their past results are playing,” Davies said. “It’s really about the players and where they are now and what we can do to support them.”
If there is an irony in all this, it’s that one of Italy’s most important innovations is right in the U.S. tennis wheelhouse. Its hard-court drive produced the male success story that predates Sinner: Matteo Berrettini, who reached the Wimbledon final in 2021 and has the booming serve and forehand of the male American tennis archetype. Sinner has followed him and transfigured men’s tennis into a game of attack or be attacked from anywhere in the court, alongside Carlos Alcaraz, his biggest rival.
But in that fallow period for male American Grand Slam champions since Roddick, clay-court skills — use of angles over linear ballstriking, variety, lateral movement and rally tolerance — defined the evolution in men’s tennis. Italy’s hard-court boom may yet create a best-of-both worlds training environment, but the U.S. tennis landscape is yet to embrace a similar hybridity.
The USTA doesn’t have to lift a finger to get players hard-court experience, since those courts dominate American tennis. The clay experience, specifically the red clay experience, which they know from experience can be so helpful, is always a work in progress, because there just isn’t all that much of it in America. The better players can find it at the Orlando training center and other select locations. Many others have to use green clay as a substitute. It’s not a great one, since sliding and ball movement is different on that surface, but it’s something, and it’s prevalent, especially in Florida.
Higueras, who lives on a ranch in Palm Springs, Calif., said he wasn’t consulted on any of the changes. Reached last week and informed that the letter had caused Sherr to focus more heavily on player development, Higueras was magnanimous.
“I wish them all the best,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Sports Business, Tennis, Women's Tennis
2025 The Athletic Media Company
Continue reading...
