I have been sparring back and forth with Brad Baughman for 2 years now....in my humble opinion he is simply an egomaniac. All American coaches are worthless and weak, he has the secret to building a world champion tennis player, he and only he.
The dad is playing games. They came to Florida to the Eddie Herr and Deiton was totally crushed by a 10 year old named Stefan Kozlov. My coaching partner saw that match, said the boy had no answer for Stefan's strategy and nice point construction. Said Deiton hit pretty well but was quite slow and had zero strategic skills for an almost 13 year old. Brad Baughman's answer was than Kozlov was probably lying about his age and was older....nonsense.
So then dad decided to play Deiton up...the old tennis dad's trick to play up so you never really lose, the other kid is just older. The Deiton lost to the 350th ranked 16 year old. Next plan.
Baughman then decided to play men's open events and avoid the juniors (his words). Its the classic game, done by tennis dad to avoid the painful truth. Play older players, never play the top kids in your age group. Hides the true ability of the kids for a while.
By the way, Deiton stopped the junior tournaments about the time Brad started talking about this video piece that was in the works. Obviously to many more loses and the story is not very good. Hard to call a 13 year old a phenom who can't beat low ranked 14-15 year olds.
Frankly, Deiton is a nice player but not a phenom by any stretch of the imagination, he is very tall for his age so he had a huge advantage as a 10-11 year old. The advantage is quickly wearing off as he moves up in age. He most likely has the game that might lead to a small college career if he works very hard. No shame in that.
The video shows such a nice boy, to bad dad needs to have his ego stroked. Someone once told me he did this same thing with a daughter years ago until the mother put an end to it.
