How the Rafa Nadal Academy is shaping tennis' next stars

Rafa Nadal's academy in his home town of Manacor is shaping the sport's stars of the future

Transcript

00:00We are a tennis academy that tries to prepare future tennis players, but at the same time

00:18we are a training academy, we prepare players not only for tennis, but also through the

00:25studio and all the training.

00:29Rafa right from the beginning, he was very clear, he wanted to give back to tennis what

00:34tennis had given him.

00:36And this meant making a wonderful tennis academy here in Manacor, but combining tennis and

00:43studies in somewhere that was very easy to do, because Rafa as we all know had a lot

00:49of trouble combining them.

00:51So Rafa has always placed the academics at the same level as the tennis.

00:56It is true that the main intention of the student when he comes here is to be a professional

01:01tennis player.

01:02This is known to be difficult to achieve, even if we put all the means to achieve it.

01:09When I came here, my rank was lower than 200, I think, ITF, and my goal was obviously to

01:16get as quick as possible to the top 100, and I made it last year, and now the goal

01:22is to finish this year at the top 10 junior, and grab some maybe ATP points, hopefully

01:29more than a few, and this is the goal for now.

01:32And in the long term, of course, I want to be a top 20, top 10 ATP player.

01:37Well, the line is very simple, you have, here I think Rafael has managed to have good

01:44coaches, but if you don't put 100% of your part, things will hardly go well.

01:52We are very clear that sport itself is technical and tactical preference, so what we have

01:59to do is accompany the player so that when he reaches high performance, he is as close

02:04as possible to these players.

02:05Obviously, then the pace of the ball or the pace of the game is an adaptation that has to be generated.

02:13I like the sport of the ball when you combine the physical with the mind.

02:23If it's just physical, we already have athletics, to run faster, here you have to try to do something else.