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Mustafah Abdulaziz for The Wall Street Journal
The new clay courts at the U.S. Tennis Center in Flushing, N.Y
The National Tennis Center in Flushing, N.Y., has 21 outdoor hard courts, the sport's largest stadium, and a $65 million indoor facility with 12 hard courts and a gym.
If you're looking for the U.S. Tennis Association's most important weapon in its fight to return the U.S. to tennis glory, though, you'll have to walk on the road behind Arthur Ashe Stadium, past the dumpsters and into a parking lot, where you'll find four clay courts inside an inflated bubble.
During the U.S. Open, the bubble comes down and the courts, which were built a year ago, are covered with plastic planks so cars can park on them. But for the rest of the year, they're the chief training ground for the elite juniors who live in the area.
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Mustafah Abdulaziz for The Wall Street Journal
Anna Ulyashchenko, 14, from Brooklyn, N.Y., dries the sweat from her face during a break.
Patrick McEnroe, who runs the USTA's player development program, says the courts are also a metaphor for what the U.S. needs to do to restore its competitive edge: Dig harder, grind longer, slide better, and get dirtier.
"We fell behind a little bit in how we train our young kids," he said. "That's not a knock on any individual, but a knock on our country."
Earlier this month, the U.S. hit a low in tennis, when for the first time since the invention of the computer ranking system, almost 40 years ago, it didn't have a single man or woman in the top 10 of the men's or women's tours. When the French Open begins Sunday, Mardy Fish, ranked No. 10, will be the highest-ranked American in either the men's or women's field. The top nine men will call Europe home. To catch up, McEnroe says, the U.S. must learn to take a page or two from the European playbook. And that means training more on clay.
For many years, clay-court specialists struggled on grass and hard courts. But over the last two decades, those surfaces have slowed down to become more like clay. Hard courts are grittier and give the ball more loft. The lawns at Wimbledon are grown on firmer dirt that holds up better over a two-week period and offers higher, truer bounces. This, combined with today's forgiving rackets and spin-inducing strings, has given an advantage to players who depend on athleticism, defense and footwork over big-shot fireworks.
"Clay is where you learn how to move—you can't cheat on clay," said Mats Wilander, the former No. 1 and three-time French Open champion. "On hard courts, you inevitably get lazy. There isn't that big of a difference between Mardy Fish and Novak Djokovic in terms of hitting the ball, but Djokovic moves 10 times better." Djokovic, ranked No. 2 in the world, has yet to lose a match this season.
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Mustafah Abdulaziz for The Wall Street Journal
Zak Steiner, 15, from Greenwich, Conn., hits a ball during practice.
Jose Higueras, who was dangerous on clay back when it was more of a specialty surface, rather than a breeding ground for greatness, now travels the U.S. as the USTA's director of coaching (McEnroe hired him in 2008). His initial take on America's young tennis players, he says, has held up over time.
"Our kids don't hit the ball worse than anybody else," he said. "They don't play as well."
The shift to clay marks a radical change in ideology for American tennis. If future generations of U.S. players are going to succeed, McEnroe and his team believe, they'll have to temper the attacking approach to tennis that has helped past Americans thrive, and adopt a more European style that prizes patience and defense. Potent offense alone—whether it's a huge serve or a blistering forehand—no longer works. "The great American players over the years have been aggressive players, and we're certainly trying to continue that," McEnroe said. "But if you can't hit a lot of balls from the back of the court, it's pretty unlikely you're going to make it to the top."
McEnroe sees another European strength that he'd like to emulate: A tennis federation that shapes training nationwide, rather than leaving it to privately run academies. "Spain has a very systematic approach to how they teach kids, when it comes to margin of error, when to attack, when to defend," he said. "You can go pretty much anywhere in Spain to a coach, and they'll teach you pretty much the same thing."
In recent years, the USTA has flown some of its top juniors and coaches to Barcelona for a closer look. At Barcelona Total Tennis, the players spend a week training on red clay, often with Francis Roig, the academy's technical director and a part-time coach to Rafael Nadal. "They're pretty surprised at the intensity of the drills—even our coaches are," McEnroe said. "It's good for our coaches to see it, the attention to detail."
Nikko Madregallejo, a 16-year-old from Monrovia, Calif. currently ranked No. 3 in the country in his age group, took part in one of the first Barcelona trips a few years ago. He now trains at the USTA's main training center in Boca Raton, Fla., where he spends a lot of time on clay. "I used to just hit balls as hard as I could and hoped that they went in, which wasn't too smart," Madregallejo said. "It has helped me a lot."
Higueras, the USTA's director of coaching, hopes to instill an intensity and urgency—don't waste a shot, build an advantage, then capitalize—that he sees in young European players. Earlier this winter, he visited the indoor clay courts at the National Tennis Center. As Higueras roamed, Robert Levine, a talented 13-year-old from Bedford, N.Y., waited for a softly hit ball and smacked a beautiful backhand. Higueras saw something else: Three seconds squandered as the ball floated over the net. "Hit a forehand, Robert, you have time!" he shouted. Later, Higueras said: "If you go to Europe, you don't see that. That's not what the kids there are programmed for. If they have time to run around the ball, they do it."
McEnroe expects that the road to success will be long. For one thing, there are 400,000 hard courts in the U.S. and only 30,000 clay courts, according to USTA estimates, and that's not likely to change anytime soon. But McEnroe said it wouldn't necessarily take mounds and mounds of clay to teach a clay-court ethic.
The USTA's two main training centers, in Boca Raton and Carson, Calif., have clay courts, and it recently moved its top international junior tournament, the Orange Bowl, from hard courts back to its clay court origins. The tournament dates back to 1947. In 2009, the U.S. had one national clay court tournament for its juniors. It now has five. Since 2008, it has raised the number of clay-court Futures tournaments for young, lower-ranked pros to 25 from 10.
"You can't predict the future, technology, whatever," McEnroe said. "But the way the game is going, it would be very surprising if we went back to some kind of bang-bang tennis. One-shot tennis is dead."
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