Canada is the toast of pro tennis right now.
The country’s rising young stars – Denis Shapovalov, Bianca Andreescu and Félix Auger-Aliassime – can’t win a match without being asked how a winter-sport nation with a sparse, spread-out population of 37m has produced three champions-in-waiting at the same time.
The Canadian high-performance program’s architect, Louis Borfiga, has been the subject of numerous stories lauding him as the genius behind the tidal wave from the Great White North.
But even Borfiga can’t really answer the multimillion-dollar question: how is Tennis Canada doing it?
If there were a foolproof recipe, the inventor would be sailing his or her yacht around their private Caribbean island after selling the secret to every national tennis association on the planet.
So the short answer to that question is: it’s complicated.
One given is that you need a lot of money.
Tennis Canada is blessed with significant revenue from the men’s and women’s Rogers Cup tournaments. And it has invested heavily in the national training center it opened in Montreal in 2007.
But having near-unlimited funds won’t buy you success.
Ask Britain’s Lawn Tennis Association, which gets the lion’s share of Wimbledon’s profits.
You need a strong development program. But ask Serbia how it produced three world No 1s – Novak Djokovic, Ana Ivanovic and Jelena Jankovic, all born within a two-and-a-half-year period – with little infrastructure and even less money.
Mostly, what you need is plain old luck.
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Andreescu, 18, shocked the tennis world when she won the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California, in March.
Shapovalov reached the top 20 two weeks before his 20th birthday after he and his good friend Auger-Aliassime, 18, both made the Miami Open semi-finals later that month.
All three arrive at the French Open as seeded players to watch.
The other seeded Canadian is Milos Raonic, who had a similarly quick rise and already was seeded when he played in very first French Open at age 20, back in 2011. Raonic, who whose career-best ranking is No 3, reached the 2016 Wimbledon singles final.
“If you look back before 2011 or 2010 and anybody said, ‘Hey, we might have a chance to compete for Grand Slams in singles’, I don’t know if anybody would have taken you seriously in any aspect of the tennis world,” Raonic said.
Raonic, along with Genie Bouchard, Vasek Pospisil and Rebecca Marino, paved the way for this new generation.
But with the exception of Bouchard, already a top prospect when she moved back home to Montreal from her training base in Florida at age 15, they were not products of the high-budget program. They came along a little too early.
What Tennis Canada did for those players was what it arguably has done best in the current regime. It provided top-class international coaches and support staff during the challenging transition from the juniors to the pros.
But even with the current crop, there is no standardized formula. Auger-Aliassime is the first pure, start-to-finish product of the system to reach the top 100. Tennis Canada have done everything right with him, especially in emphasizing the big picture over short-term results.
But Auger-Aliassime came to the sport because his father is a tennis coach.
Exceptionally, Tennis Canada made accommodations for Andreescu to not have to move to the national center. She remained at home in Toronto and developed there.
As for Shapovalov, he was never part of the program. His mother Tessa also is a tennis coach; she remains his coach today. He had a private sponsor to help fund his early career.
‘Children of immigrants’ v ‘The buddy system’
One of the theories put forth for Canada’s success is that so many of its young players are children of immigrants. That they’ve absorbed an ambition and work ethic that serves them well in a highly competitive business.
It’s an obvious conclusion; so many of the more recent players fit that description.
But at least in part, that might merely be a reflection of Canada’s big-city demographics.
A better theory is one of internal competition driving up the level.
As Marino put it this week in Paris, these things tend to come in bunches.
“With Milos and Vasek and I, all born in 1990 – Vasek and I trained at the same center in Vancouver, too – you push each other,” Marino said.
“Canada being a big country, everybody would be from a different province and play in their own provincial ranks and meet up just for nationals,” Raonic said.
“For my group, it was Vasek and I. We were the same age. For Denis and Félix, they had each other. I think that kind of constant national competition made them strive and try to make the most of things. And I think that’s a big part of the reason the success has been on such a big incline over the last few years.”
National Training Center attendance dwindling
It took 10 years after “Team 1990” for another group to put its hand up. Shapovalov was born in 1999, Andreescu and Auger-Aliassime in 2000.
But it doesn’t appear the next wave is coming any time soon.
Originally designed for a dozen players, one estimate several years ago had the cost of the services the NTC provides to each player – coaching, lodging, travel, education – at $150,000 annually. Multiply that by 12, add in administrative salaries and additional investments such as the building of five indoor Har-Tru courts at the Montreal center, and you get an idea of the magnitude of the investment.
But of the 41 kids who went through before the current class, 27 went to college in the U.S. Some have tried the pro tour. But while the success stories are notable, they are rare.
The ‘big player’ bounce
Conventional wisdom says the sport will get a big bounce when a country can produce one or several top-level pros to set the tone. The logic is that if young kids will see what is possible, if they see it on television, they’ll want to take up the sport.
“I think they had different idols. Like when they were first watching tennis, I wasn’t on tour in that sense,” Raonic said of the current crop. But I think with my breakthrough I sort of gave them the sense of belief that as a Canadian, you can do this. That the work that you put in can pay off, and it isn’t unchartered territory.”
At least in terms of numbers, that bounce has yet to occur.
When he came to Montreal to start the national center, Borfiga brought a track record of success with the French federation.
Borfiga also brought with him the French federation’s fairly rigid structure. Ultimately, you do it the Tennis Canada way, or it’s the highway.
The program’s unwillingness to be flexible may well have cost it an opportunity to claim Shapovalov as an institutional success story.
A year ago in Paris, 15-year-old named Leylah Annie Fernandez reached the girls’ singles semifinal in her first appearance at the junior Grand Slam level.
Fernandez was the only Canadian to compete in the boys’ or girls’ events. She continued her success at the Australian Open this year, reaching the girls’ singles final. But she worked with an outside coach as well as father Jorge – not with Tennis Canada coaches.
While Tennis Canada has provided some financial assistance from other bursary funds outside its high-performance structure, it hasn’t been nearly enough.
Fernandez and her family now live in Florida.
There will be three Canadians in the French Open juniors this year.
But only one, Taha Baadi, is an NTC student. This is Baadi’s final year of junior eligibility, and this will be the first time his ranking is high enough to get him into a junior Grand Slam.
Also playing is Fernandez, who will be seeded No. 2 despite playing very little junior tennis. She mostly plays low-level ITF pro events, many closer to her home.
The third Canadian is Liam Draxl, currently ranked No. 10 in the boys’ ITF rankings. But Draxl has a private sponsor.
At the national center, a program built for 12 is now down to four boys.
And the NTC is now “boys only”. Tennis Canada determined the girls simply didn’t flourish when they moved away from home to train. And so the better prospects work out of regional centers in their own cities.
On the plus side, it’s possible the new generation could have a far bigger impact than the Bouchard-Raonic-Pospisil generation.
Andreescu, Shapovalov and Auger-Aliassime are all crowd-pleasing, charismatic, appealing players.
Together, the three could finally jolt tennis out of its position as a niche sport in a hockey-mad country.
But it’s going to take more time, a lot more money and – hopefully – more luck.