The bright lights of the City, free tickets to the U.S. Open, and a chance to hang out with leaders in the tennis industry blinded participants about the message the USTA delivered at the 1987 USTA Tennis Teachers Conference.
American professional tennis was at a turning point. Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, and Chris Evert were near the end of their careers. Andre Agassi had just turned pro, Pete Sampras was a teenager, Jennifer Capriati was 11, Venus Williams was 7, and Andy Roddick was 5. The future of American tennis was actually bright, but it wasn’t evident at the time.
The top players were groomed by professionals and coaches such as Harry Hopman and Robert Lansdorp. Other players trained at academies, such as those run by Rick Macci and Nick Bolleteri. The United States was home to the best coaches in the world and the top American players trained with them.
Because the strength of the American high performance coaches wasn’t fully appreciated, there was a belief that more and better American champions could be developed if the process was formalized. As a result, featured speakers at the 1987 conference included officials from the Swedish and German tennis federations. They were invited to discuss what they were doing to produce such great champions as Boris Becker, Steffi Graf, Bjorn Borg, Mats Wilander, and Stefan Edberg.
Admittedly, it was inspiring to hear the success stories about the German and Swedish players. Attendees left the sessions nodding their heads that the future of American professional tennis was in dire straits and the USTA was going to “save American tennis” by developing a high performance program modeled after the German and Swedish programs.
In short, there was one significant difference between the German, Swedish, and American programs. The foreign federations controlled all aspects of the sport. That included oversight of a formal network of training centers where high performance players received coaching, an approach that seemed reasonable given the size of their countries (Germany is slightly smaller than Montana and Sweden is slightly larger than California). In the U.S. an informal network of high performance programs existed, but they were not centralized under the USTA.
To the casual observer, it appeared the USTA had performed due diligence by reviewing the best practices of the Swedes and Germans. In retrospect, that was a naive view of the situation, particularly given the fact humility has never been a strength of the USTA. The headline speakers at the conference should have been the top American high performance coaches, professionals, and academy directors. The 1987 Tennis Teachers Conference would have been the perfect place for them to talk about the juniors in the pipeline and how the knowledge of the coaches could have been coordinated to ensure that American tennis remained at the top.
In hindsight, it is obvious that USTA officials were clearly aware of the best practices of the Swedes and the Germans when they invited them to speak. They simply used the 1987 Tennis Teachers Conference as a coming out party to announce their intent to have a greater presence in all aspects of the sport. From an economic perspective their motive was to create a monopoly in high performance coaching and it was time for the American high performance coaches, professionals, and academy directors to get in line with the USTA’s way of thinking. The number of top ten players developed by the USTA’s Player Development program since 1987 defines the effectiveness of the program.