General / Sean Calvert / 30 July 2010 /

Some keep it in the family while others travel to far flung corners in order to hone their tennis skills. But which is the best way for young tennis players to go about their early training? Sean Calvert reports.

We've all see the smug grin of 'Uncle' Toni Nadal beaming out from the player's box, as his nephew Rafa hoovers up trophies at events around the world.

That countenance seems to say: 'I created this. This is all my own work' and he'd be right as Rafa's on-court skills were indeed honed at home under the guise of his uncle, as it would appear several of the greats have been.

Many of the successful American players over the course of the last few decades are products of an academy of one sort or another and of course Britain's Andy Murray was packed off to the Sanchez-Casal Academy in Barcelona as a teenager.

But, which of the different types of formative training has proven to be the best in terms of results over the years?

Well, of the current crop of champions, Roger Federer was nurtured and in many ways mentored from the age of 12 by the Swiss Tennis Federation's Peter Carter, who is often overlooked when Fed's career is debated.

Tragically, Carter died in a road accident at just 37-years-of-age, by which time Federer was already working with a new coach Peter Lungdren, who was the first well-known coach of the Swiss, but Carter essentially formed Fed's game.

Federer then was a product of a series of individual coaches and didn't go near to an academy as such and of course neither did Nadal, so the most successful players currently active, whilst being helped by their own country's federations, are essentially independent products.

And further proof that the independent approach is the most successful can be found by looking at the formative years of the second most decorated tennis player of all time behind Federer.

Pete Sampras' 14 Grand Slam titles were won after being brought up in a similar way to Federer in that his incredible talent was stumbled upon randomly and nurtured from there - not by an academy, but with the help of an individual.

And Pistol Pete's mentor wasn't even a coach or ex-pro, instead it was a tennis buff by the name of Peter Fischer, who in much the same way as Carter did with Federer, was pretty much the instigator of how Sampras was to play for the rest of his career.

It could also be argued that although regarded as a product of the famous Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, seven-time Grand Slam winner Andre Agassi learned the game and got his tenacity and will to win from having an obsessive father, who put his son through endless hitting sessions at home.

The Las Vegas superstar talks at great length in his autobiography, Open, about the daily hits with a ball machine on a court built by his dad and how he hated both that and the Bollettieri Academy, but Agassi remains the most successful male player to have been a full-time resident there.

Just behind Agassi is his old nemesis Boris Becker, who was also a product of the Bollettieri Academy, as was Jim Courier and more recently Tommy Haas, but the 79-year-old Bollettieri has been arguably more successful on the women's side with plenty of famous names on his alumni list.

Many American players take the college route to glory, on tennis scholarships, which proved to be successful for former UCLA student Jimmy Connors, but his mother Gloria was clearly the driving force behind Jimbo's glittering career.

Connors's own nemesis, John McEnroe was another academy product, as he was taught at the Port Washington Tennis Academy in New York.

Defending US Open champion and several other leading Argentinian players were taught at a young age (Del Potro was seven) by Marcelo Gomez before hitting the junior circuit, while fellow top-five player Nikolay Davydenko was and still is coached by his brother Eduard.

So, in terms of Grand Slams, it's a close-run thing between the academy graduates and the independent route, but you can't argue with the results achieved by Federer, Nadal and Sampras - all of whom (despite Bollettieri's claims) were nurtured the independent way.

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