workouttennis.com - twenty-five years of touring!

workouttennis.com was created in 2011, but this is the website version of a specialist tennis competition touring academy that started in 1987, over twenty-five years ago! Twenty-five years of tournament circuits - touring, coaching and setting up player programmes.

Learn about winning

Tennis is freely available on the web. There are some great sites out there, and some of them are so good I hope they will become workouttennis official partners.

We are not a website where you can directly buy merchandise.

We are not a website that will give you complete instructional videos, just some selected ones.

Instead, we are a unique tennis academy specialised on young players, almost all still in full-time education, almost all continuing this education with distance learning. These players have determined to spend some years perfecting their matchplay, and give themselves opportunites to climb up the rankings. Maybe one day they'll become a professional.

 

There are several ways of gaining World Ranking points, and exercising your one and only chance to make playing tennis your job, at least for a while. You can go away to college, US style, and combine studying at university with playing and being coached on their team. You can be selected by your National or Local Federation, and be sent away to one of their Regional Tennis Centres, to study and train with National coaches . You could pay a lot of money and go to a private academy like  Bolletieri.

They make you do schooling too, mostly. You could find a squad where schooling is not involved, just tennis.

Or you could have a dedicated parent or coach who conceives his own programme for you. Highly personalised, maybe a little imperfect, a little un-prestructured, but flexible and dynamic. workouttennis.com belongs to this last category. The child's education is nevertheless still a priority.

Federations currently dominate the rankings. Why have we gone down this route, away from the Federations? Because this was my route, and several of my contemporaries. It was an exciting, effective route.

For a variety of reasons, the other options didn't become available to me. The main problem is that I come from a country with very incomplete structures for creating professional tennis players. I had to emigrate. At that moment where you emigrate you may be able to latch onto some perfect structures, but you, as a foreign National, don't have access to those structures as the locals do. You could argue that, ideally, you want to first of all become a good player in your own country, in your own structures. Your chances of success are very good. That's true.  

Going it alone has advantages. If you get some help with accommodation, facilities, finance, planning and coaching, travelling to a new country could in fact give you an advantage over a player who has spent all his life playing with coaches who teach the same way, and surrounded by a culture that conditions and brainwashes you. They may know their business, but the tennis world is a particularly rich one. There is not just one way of playing. There is not just one set of conditions and structures. What is important is to decide where you belong, and how you are to get to the top of that.

That is the workouttennis.com speciality. We select specifically from these fringe players, not committed elsewhere, who are ready to work in a small, ever-changing group. There are never more than six people on the site at any one time. It is very small.

Tennis academy squads - dynamic learning

The disadvantage that workouttennis.com has is economies of scale. We do not mass-produce tennis players. One of our objectives is to give young people a life experience, NOT just learn how to work out and play matches. We want the whole experience to be character-building, enriching, fast track and unique. We help the players with schooling and finance. As a priority, we select players who are either participating in a distance Learning programme, who are on the point of going to, or on leave from, university. About 25% of our players since 1987 have already stopped studies, so not yet in full-time employment. But this group is fast disappearing, no longer qualifying for scholarships. These players now have the opportunity to stay with workouttennis.com as a working coach, and continue playing French tournaments in their spare time.    

workouttennis.com has essential partnerships to other organisations, principally equipment suppliers,  federations, clubs and learning centres. In fact workouttennis.com grew out of a combination of factors:- travelling tennis coach + accommodation centre + facility + sponsors + charity.

There is one aspect that differentiates workouttennis.com from other tennis academies. We are the tennis arm of a registered charity that was created in 2002 called Challenge Europe. This charity for performance-oriented youth projects, is run by a Committee of experienced academics, sports teachers and business people. The charity organises scholarships and sponsorships for young people. They have given essential structure and know-how behind our scholarship scheme. None of the actors in Challenge Europe, or its tennis arm, workouttennis.com, receive any remuneration, nor have any work contract. All work is entirely benevolent.

workouttennis.com is a tennis facility, a charity, and a website that has three principal objectives : -
. administer successful scholarships from our sponsors

. link to videos, and articles that demonstrate some of the essentials of our teaching for players that want to become professionals

. link to various tournament circuits, some for juniors, some seniors, some for professionals. 

How do we finance our tours?

You may be surprised but going on tour does not need to be expensive. The cheapest way is to do it in a motorhome, where effectively you are always at home at a tennis tournament. I have experienced this, and it was great fun, and indeed, cheap. However, I contest that you cannot be permanently on the road.

. We ask money from everybody who comes on tour. We ask everyone to understand what operational costs are involved, and that by accepting a certain economy of scale, in other words working in groups, we can save ourselves our resources, energy and cash. It works very well.

There are three unofficial categories of participant. You may find a player fits into one of them specifically, you may find one who belongs to all three.

Tennis player types

The first category is a "young" person, who has decided himself to commit himself to tennis for a few years, and might claim to be playing full-time. These will tend to be players who make their own decisions, probably finished with traditional education. They tend to be very independant, hard workers, but may have set ideas about how to achieve their goals.

The second is a young person who is squeezing tennis in around other things, work and studying mostly. They may come on tennis tours frequently over a few years, but have difficulty in planning tennis in around other things that they must be doing.

The third is a young player, possibly the youngest of the three, where certain decision-making has been made by parents or sponsors. This person has, from a young age, decided to commit himself to a full tennis regime for several years, and solutions to studying may have to be innovative and flexible.

This third category is generally our most usual choice for scholarships, but not necessarily. For a scholarship you must display commitment to a structure and work ethic over at least a year. The total value of the scholarships is about € 20,000 p.a. In other words, using workouttennis.com structures, tennis education based around tournaments will cost € 20,000 per year. This includes all coach fees, travel, court costs, inscriptions, insurances, equipment. We know that a typical university education in UK has a real cost of about €35,000 per head p.a. where real economies of scale are available. So you can see that workouttennis.com is indeed a real "value" solution.

 

For those not on scholarships, the food and accommodation costs must be met. We encourage players to find sponsors to find the € 7,000 p.a. to complete the financial picture. Even with this, the total cost of producing a tennis player is still very reasonable, and cheaper than a university education. How long does it take to produce a tennis player? Five Years.