Ground strokes of inspiration

The gig: Co-founders and head coaches of Advantage Tennis Academy in Irvine, which trains promising school-age players for tournament play. The academy, which uses facilities on the grounds of the Racquet Club of Irvine, currently has about 100 students, of whom 30 are full-time, including 20 boarding students. The full-time and boarding students get their academic schooling via the Irvine School District or Laurel Springs Home School, an Ojai-based distance-learning program for young athletes and performers.

Backgrounds: Mahmoud Karim, 28, was born in Cairo. As a top-ranked Egyptian tennis amateur he moved to Florida with his twin sister, also a top-ranked player, in 1995 to train at Tampa’s Saddlebrook Tennis Academy. Johnson, 41, hails from what he jokingly describes as “the tennis mecca of Duluth, Minn.” A competitive ski racer as a youth, he gravitated to tennis during the latter sport’s boom in the 1970s and ranked as a top junior.

Education and training: Karim attended Rice University for a year but found that the “Houston weather didn’t agree with me.” He transferred to Loyola Marymount University for three more semesters, then returned to Saddlebrook to take the opportunity to train with Pete Sampras and Marcelo Rios. Later he received a degree in finance from Cal State Fullerton. Johnson entered Trinity University in San Antonio when it had a nationally ranked tennis team, only to be disappointed when the school dropped out of Division I tennis soon thereafter. He moved to the tennis technical program at Tyler (Texas) Junior College, a training ground for coaches.

The path: Karim found his way to tennis education through injuries. The night before he was to leave for Wimbledon to play in a junior tournament in 1997, he tore a ligament in his left ankle. That didn’t end his playing career, but shoulder problems that surfaced a few years later did. During his rehabilitation, he says, “I started teaching and fell in love with coaching tennis. I decided to transition.” During his college years, Johnson says, “I knew my goal was to open a tennis school someday.” That conviction was reinforced at Tyler, which was offering the first degree program in tennis coaching under Steve Smith, a nationally known trainer of coaches. He brought in Karim as his first partner in establishing Advantage, which was founded with their personal funds. “The next jump is for us to double its size,” he says.

The vision: Johnson says he aimed to develop a system that combined a top-flight college preparatory setting with high-level tennis training to “bring Southern California back to the Tracy Austin-Pete Sampras-Lindsay Davenport era.”

The product: Karim and Johnson point to top-ranked junior player Michael McClune, their first student, as one of their biggest successes. McClune, a 19-year-old currently ranked 450th in the world, started at Advantage at age 13. He says one of the great virtues of the program is its attention to the mental side of competitive tennis, to which it devotes an hour three times a week. “It’s the only academy I’ve ever seen that does that,” McClune says. “They teach you how to deal with nerves or a slump, or what you can change during a match. It really helps you, not just with tennis but with life.”

--

michael.hiltzik@latimes.com