Obituary: Nick Bollettieri
The ITF is saddened to learn of the death of legendary tennis coach Nick Bollettieri, who passed away on 4 December aged 91.
Bollettieri was famed for shaping the early careers of some of the biggest names in the sport.
He developed 10 players who would become world No. 1s: Andre Agassi, Boris Becker, Jim Courier, Martina Hingis, Jelena Jankovic, Marcelo Rios, Monica Seles, Maria Sharapova, and Serena and Venus Williams, and his remarkable impact touched numerous others.
The likes of Jimmy Arias, Carling Bassett, Thomas Enqvist, Brad Gilbert, Brian Gottfried, Anna Kournikova, Mary Pierce, Mark Phillippousis, Nicole Vaidisova and Tommy Haas all worked with Bollettieiri and went on to achieve Top 10 status.
Perhaps surprisingly, given his incredible legacy of success as a coach in the sport, Bollettieri was never an elite tennis player.
He played American football at high school, was a former paratrooper in the military, and briefly attended law school, but the peak of his on-court efforts was in playing a single season of college tennis in Alabama.
After using tennis coaching for ad-hoc earnings while at law school in Miami following his time in the army, Bollettieri took on a teaching position at a tennis resort in Florida in 1976 and seized an opportunity to open his eponymous tennis academy a year later.
Using investments from a friend in 1980, he built a live-in tennis academy in Bradenton, Florida and attracted a host of talented junior players, not to mention plenty of media attention, with both groups lulled by the ex-Army lieutenant who could create tennis champions.
Bollettieri sold his academy to IMG in 1987 (it has since expanded to a 400-acre complex and branched out to include eight different sports) but continued to play a key role in the development of the tennis academy and its programmes - as a host of now-household names continued to come through the doors with eyes on tennis stardom.
The American took part in the ITF World Coaches Conference in 2013, sharing his expertise with leading tennis coaches around the world, and was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame the following year.