USTA Program Coming to Carson

It was a board meeting at Indian Wells more than a year ago when the USTA fielded criticism about its player development program. Eliot Teltscher, among others, later characterized the situation as “treading water.”

The path to a possible solution was cleared, coincidentally, with the construction by the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) of a major facility in Southern California, the $130-million sports complex in Carson, which includes a 13,000-seat tennis stadium and 36 new or renovated courts.

AEG and the USTA will announce today that the USTA will launch its USA Tennis High Performance national training center in Carson, a program designed to mold future champions in a competitive environment. The headquarters for the program remain in Key Biscayne, Fla., giving the USTA a presence in two hotbeds.

Months ago, AEG announced the Carson facility will house the Pete Sampras Tennis Academy. That academy is not affiliated with the USTA’s developmental plans. The Home Depot National Training Center is scheduled to be completed in June 2003.

Said Paul Annacone, the managing director of USA High Performance: “One of the things we’re trying to do is give the players in the hotbeds of America a facility to help chase their dreams.

“This has been a great breeding ground for champions. They [the Southern California Tennis Assn.] have done a great job in the past, and we look forward to trying to have some good integration with those folks.”

It has been difficult to put the top players in consistent, competitive situations against one another because of simple geography.

“With all of our great resources, one of the biggest liabilities we have is actually the size of our country,” Annacone said. “Some of the smaller countries have done so well because they have centralized their training for their best players. We have a great challenge to figure out the best way to set up a situation that would mirror that even though the country is so large.”

Arlen Kantarian, the USTA’s chief executive of professional tennis, said the AEG deal is a first step in a series of upcoming moves.

“It is certainly part of a much larger deal, and a larger concept moving forward,” he said. “This training center is the first tangible development in continuing to build more tennis programming in L.A., continuing with their facility expertise, to the possibility of building new state-of-the-art complexes or training centers in other key cities.”