BOCA RATON, Fla. — Here, at a very different kind of boarding school, two young women are acing most of their tests and a good many of their opponents.
Both happen to be from the Atlanta area. And both have a similar, clear purpose: While others their age wander between the food court and American Eagle, they are trying to resuscitate American tennis.
Grace Min and Taylor Townsend have discovered that big goals come with some sizable sacrifices.
Like sleep. For boarders who want to eat breakfast at the United States Tennis Association’s South Florida training center, there’s no hitting the snooze button. The kitchen closes at 7:10 a.m. Practice, conditioning and schooling can run as late as 10 at night. Then doze in your dorm room and start all over again.
For other teens, a driver’s license is the golden ticket to freedom and a car is more necessary than food or water. Min is 18 and hasn’t found the need yet to get so much as her learner’s permit. What’s the rush, she wonders.
And Min and Townsend can forget going through the whole slouching, insouciant phase that is such an endearing part of growing up.
“Everyone expects the best from you here,” Min said during a morning break from the training center regimen. On this particular late-spring day, that schedule included some light hitting, agility drills and an online earth science test. “They give you everything that you need and you should bring back your best. You’ve got to show up every day ready to work. Some days are harder than others to be on the court, but it’s worth it at the end.”
The full-immersion method of training now being employed by the USTA has produced the past two girls’ major champions — Min at the U.S. Open juniors and Townsend at January’s Australian Open juniors.
Winning a juniors title, even one attached to such prestigious events, is no guarantee of success later on the main stage. “You’d be nuts to think that was an automatic ticket to the promised land,” said Patrick McEnroe, who, as the general manager of USTA player development, is charged with improving the American profile on the court.
But, as Townsend’s USTA coach Kathy Rinaldi points out about this early stage of development, it’s more about the journey than the destination. “You have to worry not so much about the future and just take your successes and build from them,” she said.
Career paths
These are eventful days for both players. Consider Townsend’s May. In one month, the 16-year-old ascended to No. 1 in the ITF world junior rankings. She returned home long enough to go to the prom at Riverdale’s Charles Drew High School, where her father is the principal. And then she left for Paris, where French Open junior play begins Sunday. Townsend is also planning her first trip to the Wimbledon juniors in late June.
Min is making the transition from the juniors to the ranks of the full-blown pros. While still young enough for the girls draw, she decided that winning at the U.S. Open as an unseeded upstart was the perfect way to conclude that part of her career. She has since begun playing in second-tier USTA Pro Circuit events in the U.S., winning three of them this year.
Slogging through the minor leagues of pro tennis, Min hopes to raise her WTA world ranking enough to soon make the jump to bigger events, including qualifiers for the Grand Slam tournaments.
Since the close of 2011, her world ranking has climbed from 414th to 176th. She is not playing in Paris, but hopes to play in the Wimbledon qualifier.
The two players could not be more different physically or culturally, each in her own way a ringing endorsement for diversity in an often monochromatic sport.
The daughter of Korean immigrants who settled in the Atlanta area before she was born, Min is 5-foot-4. Her compact stature and quickness mandate a counter-punching style of play, in which she patrols the baseline, runs down everything and frustrates her opponents with her tenacity.
As a bulkier 5-foot-7 African-American player with a powerful all-court game, Townsend is often cast as the next Williams sister in all but name.
In fact, as Venus and Serena’s father, Richard Williams, watched Townsend play a U.S. Open qualifying match last year, he told a New York Times writer, “I think she’s better than my daughters at that age. She has more variety.”
That is quite a bundle for an adolescent to carry, but one Townsend appears to handle easily. “Honestly,” she said, “I don’t feel pressure. I don’t feel like I’m No. 1 in the world.”
“Taylor is really handling it all well,” Rinaldi said. “She has her eye on the big picture, I think. She’s going to continue, I hope, to put her head down and work hard. She needs to keep things simple, which she’s doing. There’s no rush.”
‘What she wants to do’
Townsend was born in Chicago, but she and her family moved south in 2004 to train at the South Fulton Tennis Center, run by friends and fellow Windy City transplants Donald and Ilona Young. Their son, Donald Jr., is currently No. 50 in the ATP world rankings.
It was partially on the advice of the Youngs that the Townsends decided to entrust Taylor to the intensity of the USTA program. She needed to significantly upgrade her training, Donald Young Sr. advised, in a way that the Townsends couldn’t manage on their own. An educator’s salary wouldn’t stretch that far. But once a player is accepted into the USTA’s development program, all the playing, training, housing and educational expenses are taken care of.
Likewise, the Mins could not have afforded advanced training for their daughter. Heebong Min has run a number of shoe repair shops around the Atlanta area and his wife, Sue, works for a store that produces youth team uniforms.
Both girls left home to live and train in Boca Raton, one of three USTA national training centers, just as they would have been entering high school here.
Letting go of his child was horrible, Gary Townsend said. But, “it was a track decided by Taylor. This is what she wants to do,” he said. Taylor’s mother, Sheila, recently moved to Florida to more closely oversee her daughter’s training.
Both girls faced big adjustments moving away so young. They had to adapt to the strict scheduling of their time, the long hours of training, the different dynamics of online schooling, the little frivolities of “normal” teenage life.
“I think it’s a very easy trade-off,” Grace Min said. “Not that I don’t miss my friends at home and my family. But I love traveling and I love playing and being exposed to different situations and trying to deal with them. That’s the exciting part.”
The USTA’s player development program is serious work done on a serious scale. These aren’t kids at recess, flailing away beneath the Florida sun. Around them is a complex support system, including a full dorm, a dining hall, a modern physical training area, an online classroom and all the coaching a player could ever use.
Every court is monitored by camera. So, while Min is practicing her serve, another coach may spot the fact that she is not turning her body enough and come out to correct her. “You have to always be on your best behavior,” she said, nodding toward one of the cameras.
This is the USTA’s answer to the training techniques that have been so successful in stocking the world rankings with European players. Currently, only two of the top 50-ranked women and four of the top 50-ranked men in the world are American.
“This is not necessarily about creating a better champion,” McEnroe said. “What we said was let’s make more really good players and, with more numbers, the chance of finding that one great player is greater.”
Two girls from the Atlanta area — who, because of their age difference and varied playing schedules, don’t cross paths all that often — are important players in that search.
Saving American tennis, however, was not foremost on Min’s mind as another training session drew to a close in the afternoon. Looking to finish her high school classes this summer, she had an assignment to work on that evening. It was an essay, on visualizing a day in her adult life.
It struck Min, who had to grow up fast as a tennis prodigy, how that future day may not be all that different from the one she was just finishing.
TAYLOR TOWNSEND
Born: April 16, 1996, Chicago
Hometown: Stockbridge
Plays: Left-handed (two-handed backhand)
Titles: Australian Open girls, singles and doubles (2012), Easter Bowl championship (2012), Pan American ITF Championships (2011).
Personal: Sister Symone recently signed to play tennis at Florida A&M. Both Taylor and her sister looked up to Serena and Venus Williams — “What we looked up to was how they stuck with each other through everything and they wouldn’t be where they are without each other,” Taylor has said. “When I saw them, I thought I could be them one day. That was always my dream.”
GRACE MIN
Born: May 6, 1994, Atlanta
Hometown: Lawrenceville
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
ITF Pro Titles: $25,000 Innisbrook (Fla.); $50,000 Indian Harbour Beach (Fla.); $25,000 Raleigh. All in 2012.
Junior Titles: U.S. Open girls (2011); Wimbledon girls doubles (2011).
Personal: Has a 3.8 GPA in her online high school studies, struggling most in math, she said. Father Heebong excelled in swimming and track back in Korea. Mother Sue is an avid ALTA player who still will occasionally hit with her daughter if Grace agrees to go leftie.
FRENCH OPEN
When: Today-June 10
2011 Men’s Singles Champion: Rafael Nadal of Spain.
2011 Women’s Singles Champion: Li Na of China.
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