Player Development Gets Extra Attention
If the U.S. Tennis Assn. was looking for genial backslapping, quiet polite words of encouragement and a toast to the health of Andy Roddick at its board meeting last month at Indian Wells, a review of the guest list suggested otherwise.
After all, Brad Gilbert was in the room.
If something isn’t working, Gilbert will tell you that and how it happened and why it happened and which employee on the assembly line screwed up. In this case, real opinions are positive. In regard to player development, the USTA doesn’t need polite; it requires views, even controversial ones.
Even with Gilbert on hand, other coaches, players and officials were allowed to speak--Todd Martin, Paul Annacone, Harold Solomon, U.S. Davis Cup captain Patrick McEnroe, Pam Shriver and Eliot Teltscher, to name a few.
One high-ranking USTA official came away impressed by Teltscher’s comments at the board meeting. Although Teltscher, until recently, had been a USTA national coach, the official had not heard from him about player development in an open forum.
Teltscher’s rhetoric was hardly revolutionary but apparently the USTA needed to hear it. He, and the others, firmly believe there should be a national training center, even two. One in Carson and another in Florida.
That way the best players would compete against one another more often.
If this sounds painfully obvious, well, apparently it isn’t happening enough. Teltscher sharply criticized the USTA’s recently installed “Optimum Schedule,” which he believes takes away from sectional play. For him, the players would prosper with more local competition.
“I call it the not-so-optimum schedule,” he said, laughing. “It’s creating a system where the kids play less and less. The people who wanted it felt it would do the opposite. If you take the best players and put them in the same place, they’ll get better. It’s like putting four of the best writers in the same class and they’ll make each other better.”
Teltscher, a former top-10 player, spoke of the benefits of intense sectional competition when he was a local junior. He remembered playing Robert Van’t Hof as many as five to seven times a year at events in Whittier and Long Beach. Later, the class of Pete Sampras, Michael Chang, Jeff Tarango and even Andre Agassi, who traveled here from Las Vegas, benefited by continually playing each other in Southern California when they were juniors.
“It’s a lot harder playing the kids down the street,” Teltscher said. “With this system [top juniors] don’t have to play them [local events] anymore. It’s letting them off the hook. At the pro level, matches come down to three to five points. It comes down to how well you handle the pressure.”
There are promising developments on a national level with the men, of course. Roddick, 18, beat Sampras last month in Miami and his achievements are well-chronicled and closely followed. Teltscher left his position as a USTA national coach earlier this year to work exclusively with Taylor Dent of Newport Beach, and said he would not have done so if he didn’t think so highly of Dent, who will turn 20 on Tuesday.
“Both those guys have a great chance of being in the top 10 and winning Grand Slam titles, but the reality is that neither one has done that at this point,” Teltscher said. “We get excited very quickly when anybody does almost anything. There’s almost a desperation. If we had 10 guys like Roddick and Taylor, then we wouldn’t be making that big a deal about any one of them.
“I gave a speech once about finding the next Pete Sampras. I said, the problem is we’re looking for the next Pete Sampras. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack. We want to find the next [Pete] Sampras-Courier-Agassi-Chang-
Tarango-[Mal] Washington-Martin. What we basically want to find is a really good haystack.
“If you just try to find Pete Sampras, I don’t think you’re going to find him.”
Teltscher came away from the meeting feeling “cautiously optimistic” and was impressed with new USTA president Merv Heller.
The feeling after the meeting was that the straight talk will be nothing but empty words if nothing happens in the next six months.
“We’re in a bit of trouble,” Teltscher said. “We’re treading water. The plus is that Agassi and Sampras have really stayed the course for an extremely long time. Agassi is looking better than he has ever been--to me he could easily be winning Grand Slams for another three to five years.
“So those guys are buying the rest of the guys some time. But something better happen in the next three to five years or it could get troublesome.”
