ANNA KOURNIKOVA AT BOLLETTIERI TENNIS ACADEMY.
Famous players who have attended the Bolletieri Academy include Martina Hingis, Monica Seles, Venus Williams, Serena Williams, Mary Pierce, Pete Sampras, Jim Courier, and Andre Agassi.
Anna Kournikova was still 10 when she was enrolled in the IMG-owned Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Florida, in Feburary, 1992.
Anna Kournikova had only been at the academy a couple of months when head coach Nick Bolletieri said “I’ve seen them all, but this one actually frightens me. She knows everything– what she wants to do and how she’s going to get there. She’s not only the youngest real prospect I’ve ever had, but the best.”
10-year-old Anna Kournikova receiving instruction from Nick Bolletieri in early 1992, her first year at his academy.
Later, in his book, My Aces, My Faults (written with the late Dick Schaap, published in 1996), Bolletieri says about Anna Kournikova….
Anna Kournikova was a dazzling little girl, bubbling with enthusiasm. When she was ten years old, she hit with Pete Sampras on our red clay court. “I was hitting him always drop shots,” she says, “and I remember him yelling and saying ‘You’re beating me with drop shots!’ I remember that.” Anna also hit with Andre. “I felt more comfortable with Sampras,” she recalls.
Anna Kournikova was pampered, placed on a pedastal, hailed as the next Seles, and as she entered her teens, she thought she was Queen Tut. She was rude, conceited; in other words, she was a teenager. I began to suspect that, even though I believed Anna Kournikova had superior tennis talent, she would be surpassed by Venus Williams or Martina Hingis…
Right now [1996], if I had to choose among Hingis, Williams, and Anna Kournikova, I would certainly lean towards Anna… Anna Kournikova, with considerable help from her mother, Alla, has survived a couple of tough years and begun to grow on court and off. Her self-confidence is, to say the least, considerable.
About her time at the Bolletieri Academy, Anna Kournikova says…
“From August to May, I’d be in Miami, and then I would spend the summer in Moscow. It was very different in America, but the Academy made everything easy for me. There were great facilities. I had lots of fruit, tennis balls, tennis rackets, tennis courts, and lots of kids to play with.”
