Today is world tennis day, our student-athletes will celebrate it playing tennis. They do celebrate it every day playing tennis.
They play tennis every day and enjoy the sport like the first day. It is funny that is worlds tennis day because for most of our athlete tennis is their world. They have so much love for the sport that they decide to come here for the whole year to dedicate themselves to this sport. Our athletes play between 3-4 hours a day.
During their day, they get to play tennis, go to fitness to work on their body, go to school, and on the weekends play tournaments. Their school is dedicated to achieving success in academics and, it is well adapted with their tennis life being a priority for our athletes. During the year, our athletes work on being away from home living with a group of friends from different places and cultures. They come to understand the term hard work on court as they give everything during practices. When they go to school, they have to keep up with all the academic growth they need for their development. All this hard work is shown with our weekend tournaments. During the weekends, our athletes play tournaments to gain ranking, compete, and get better with their game. These tournaments are the key to their development, they have to perform their best to become better and, learn from their defeats.
But, we are not only a tennis and school academy, but we are also more than that. We teach our athletes how to be independent, we teach them how to make important decisions, we teach them our principles of respect, effort, and discipline and most importantly we teach them to develop their character. During their stay here, our athletes will grow in academics, sports, and life. We are giving the junior athletes an opportunity to become better through sport and to get them ready for the next step of their careers as being either professional athletes, going to the best US Universities, becoming the next entrepreneur, or whatever our student-athletes wish to become.
During the year-round program, our juniors become student-athletes at the ES Academy and we are the ones responsible for their development so for that we design a plan. We usually divide the student-athletes into different categories depending on their age and tennis level once they come, after divided we create our tutories program. The tutories program is a group of athletes placed within their same level that will stay like that for the rest of the semester, each group is around 6 athletes with 1 coach responsible. The coach designs a tournament calendar with his/her group that fits the needs of all the athletes from that group. He/She also works with the school to check up on the schedule of each one of his/her group of players. During practices, the athletes will be placed with their group at the morning sessions to work on the specific things that the coach designed for them. During the semester, the coach will be the guide of the athlete’s development and will also be a support during the academic, physical, and mental pillars as well as when off-court times. This process will stay recorded in their semester reports where the parents will also play a key role in their awareness of the progress of their child. They will be the ones seeing all of the work that has been done and will be able to talk with their tutor/coach to comment on further steps.
As you can see our world tennis day is not about one day only, but about tennis being our world. Our passion is a vehicle that our student-athletes use to have growth and success.
Marketing department of ES Florida
Tatiana Batalla & Silvia Guitart
