Road Wearier : Fullerton’s Kim Finds Life on USTA Circuit Is No Joy Ride

A year ago, Fullerton’s Kevin Kim was one of the United States Tennis Assn.’s prized prospects. After reaching the finals of the Easter Bowl boys’ 18 tournament, Kim appeared to be on his way to becoming the next Pete Sampras or Andre Agassi of American men’s tennis.

But before summer ended, Kim was losing in the first round of nearly every tournament he entered and suddenly he appeared closer to becoming a tennis burnout at 17. Though he never seriously considered leaving the game he had played almost daily for 11 years, Kim questioned himself, his USTA coaches and his decision to attend the Palmer Tennis Academy in Tampa, Fla.

“I blamed everyone,” he said. “It was sort of my fault. I should have thought about it better before I made some of my decisions.”

Kim was playing so poorly he figured he wouldn’t be renamed to the USTA’s six-member boys’ national team.

“I really thought that would be the best thing for me at the time,” Kim said. “I thought maybe not being on the team would take some of the pressure off me. I could just go out and play.”

However, Kim was given one of the coveted spots on the boys’ national team and lately has begun to regain his form of last year. He reached the singles quarterfinals of an international tournament in Paraguay last month and won the event’s doubles tournament with Michael Russell.

But there is concern within the tennis community that Kim’s struggles are systematic of other problems within junior tennis and the USTA.

Seemingly everyone familiar with Kim’s career has a theory on why his game fell apart. Some say he was overtrained, some say he was over-coached and others say the USTA is at fault for a travel schedule that was too rigorous. The USTA says Kim might have simply gone into a slump.

But many coaches, players and parents believe too much time and money is spent helping top-ranked players such as Kim and not enough resources are spent turning lower-ranked players into Kevin Kims. Sam Olson and Tim Pawsat, two of the top junior coaches in Orange County, say the USTA’s role in further developing players such as Kim is vastly overrated.

Pawsat, a highly ranked junior who played at USC and later on the professional tour, said he thinks players are born more than developed.

“The guy’s going to be good or he’s not going to be good,” Pawsat said. “Anything the USTA does to help promote tennis is excellent, but whether a player is really helped by them, I’m not sure. Coaching is a little bit of it, but for someone to be great they have to have the will.”

Olson, who coached Kim before he joined the national team, wonders how much Kim’s USTA experience has actually furthered his career.

“I think he’d be a better player today if he was working out at home on a daily basis,” said Olson, who runs a tennis academy at the Balboa Bay Racquet Club. “Traveling the world and seeing a USTA coach who doesn’t know his background doesn’t give him any consistency.

“Could you imagine [figure skater] Michelle Kwan going to see a different coach every couple of months? That wouldn’t happen, but that’s what we do with our top tennis players. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. You don’t take someone out of an environment that’s made someone successful.”

The USTA didn’t exactly take Kim out of that environment. Kim took himself out of it when he left for Palmer before his junior year at Sunny Hills High. Since then, Kim has worked with coaches at Palmer and members of the USTA coaching staff.

“We try not to sever that player-coach relationship,” said Ron Woods, USTA director of player development. “We don’t want to take them away from their coach. We try to supplement whatever their personal coach does.”

But Kim said he’s unsure what his relationship is with USTA’s coaches.

“You see them a couple times a year,” he said. “You don’t know what they want to see. It’s hard. You don’t talk to them much.”

Seena Hamilton, founder and director of the Easter Bowl tournament, has seen Kim reach the finals of her event the last two years. She is worried that talented juniors such as Kim are being overextended by the USTA.

“The top kids who are chasing points [for a world ranking] travel more than the average pro,” she said. “Kevin Kim was a star ready to leap forward. Instead of making him burn out and traveling him around the world, they should have been exposing him to people like [Davis Cup coach] Tom Gullickson and giving him more incentives like letting him hit with the Davis Cup team. You don’t knock him out traveling 25 weeks a year.”

Woods admits over-traveling is a concern of the USTA, a nonprofit organization with an annual budget of $12 million. The USTA is the official governing body for tennis in America. The USTA says it uses its budget to train and encourage tennis players of all ages and skill levels. It also presents the U.S. Open and sponsors teams for Davis Cup, Federation Cup and the Olympics.

“We try to normalize these kids’ lives as much as possible,” Woods said. “We try to tell kids and their parents that rest is important. You can probably only peak three or four times a year. We see kids chasing points by playing a lot of international and pro satellite tournaments. We don’t encourage that. We put limits on what they can do.

“We try not to have them gone for extended periods of time. We do have guidelines on the number of matches they play in a year. . . . maybe 60 or 70 matches, but a lot of that depends on how many matches a player is winning in individual tournaments.”

Woods realizes Kim wasn’t winning many matches last year.

“We’re sensitive to his troubles last year,” Woods said. “It’s not that he wasn’t putting forth effort. I think [Kim] did some major reassessment of his approach to tennis. Right now, it looks pretty positive. Sometimes young kids go through those spells. Remember these are young kids.”

Alan Ma, director of coaching at Palmer, said Kim lost his confidence last year.

“He plays a very aggressive game,” Ma said. “He goes for big shots. You have to play with a lot of confidence to play that style.

“He put a lot of pressure on himself last year. He was thinking about college, passing the SAT, growing up. He doesn’t operate very well under those circumstances. He’d get up at 5:30 in the morning three, four times a week and hit serves. Sometimes there are no answers. Maybe he was trying too hard.”

Olson said he barely recognized Kim the last time he saw him play.

“He just got out of what it was that made him great--hitting the ball,” Olson said. “He used to be able to hit a winner from anywhere on the court, but when I saw him he was hitting top spin and hitting balls short with angles. A lot of guys can get the ball back, but not many can hit as hard as Kevin.”

Geoff Abrams of Newport Beach also went through a losing spell as a member of the national team. Abrams was the top-ranked 14-year-old in the country in 1992, but his ranking fell off to 20th nationally by 1995 and he was dropped from the national team. Lately, Abrams has been playing as well as any junior in the country. His world ranking is 20th, second-highest among all American juniors.

Is it a coincidence Abrams’ play has improved since being dropped from the national team?

“There is some value in not being a part of a highly visible group,” Woods said. “Geoff has played better. He wasn’t quite as much of a mark when he was off the team.”

But Abrams, who attended Palmer for two semesters and is finishing his senior year at Newport Harbor, said his recent climb in the rankings has no connection with being dropped from the national team.

Though Abrams is no longer with the national team, he is a member of the USTA’s Training Assistance Program, essentially a second team for the national squad. The 15 to 20 male members of TAP receive USTA assistance only for certain tournaments and don’t receive as much coaching as national team members.

Abrams said he has no bitterness toward the USTA and thanks the organization for enhancing his career and broadening his background.

“My ranking and my results didn’t support me,” he said. “I completely understood. It was very well handled.”

Abrams said he wouldn’t trade his two years on the national team for anything.

“Looking back on it, when I get in a close match I can draw on those experiences I had with the USTA,” he said. “My traveling experiences were about all positive. Traveling all over the world is such a good thing. I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today without the USTA. They want to develop you as a whole person so that you can be more worldly.”

An Easter Bowl survey found that a large group of ranked junior players believe the USTA is not helping enough people. While 42% of those surveyed said the USTA was supportive of their careers, 67% said they have never received any financial support from the USTA.

“The kids said the USTA was very inconsistent,” said Hamilton. “They said the greatest public relations move the USTA could do would be to expand the base of their financial support.

“In an essay question, 40% of the kids said that too much attention is paid to those who get high rankings and not enough to those who have potential.”

But Woods said the TAP program reaches 40 to 50 male and female players each year. He added that the USTA takes another two groups of 15 players each overseas every year for three weeks so they can play on clay courts.

“It’s important for them to have some of those experiences and understand what’s out there,” Woods said. “Our object is not to make the pool of talent so narrow.”

But Fullerton’s Joseph Gilbert, a close friend of Kim’s and a top-30 ranked junior for most of the last three years, said he has never been included in any USTA program.

“I guess I don’t talk to the right people,” said Gilbert, who is training with his private coach in Sacramento and doing independent study instead of attending Sunny Hills. “My parents don’t believe in playing politics. My dad believes in hitting ball after ball.”

Still, Gilbert was so upset about being passed over for USTA assistance in 1994 that he wrote a letter to USTA boys’ Coach Nick Saviano.

“How can they say you’re the top six players and we’re going to spend money on you and not anyone else?” Gilbert said. “With that much money, you can’t single out six guys. I’ve been ranked top 15 in the nation, but not once has anyone from the USTA ever talked to me about tennis. It’s not like I can’t play with these guys, but they sure make you feel like it.”

Andrew Kim is grateful for the USTA’s help in shaping his son Kevin’s career, but he also wonders if the organization is reaching enough people.

“I think the USTA must expand beyond the top five or six, maybe to 15 or 20,” he said.

Andrew Kim, a state boxing commissioner and owner of a manufacturing company, said the current system creates too much jealousy and envy among the players.

“Kevin is not a kid who likes to display he’s on the national team,” said Kim, who was his son’s coach almost 10 years. “The minute he gets off the court, he changes clothes. He doesn’t like to be exposed as a member of the national team.”

At the end of the year, Kim won’t be a member of the national team. He will be three months into his freshman year of college; he is deciding between USC, UCLA and Miami. By then, the debate over whether the USTA helped or hindered Kim will die down.

But there will surely be more Kevin Kims. How many? That’s what worries Sam Olson.

“We need to develop more kids at the grass-roots level,” Olson said. “They should have 100 Kevin Kims. Most kids don’t train enough to be as good as Kevin Kim. If they had 100 Kevin Kims coming out of Southern California, think of how many good players we’d have.”