The Proposition

[OTMPut]

$400K capital invsetment and $140K a year working capital just to stay in teh business. With incredibly skewed odds of making it.
No wonder sane people would rather have their kids attend Ivy schools.

Wire: Bloomberg Sports (BSP) Date: Aug 25 2014 7:00:00
Want Your Kid to Win the Open? Spend $400,000 on Tennis Lessons


By Danielle Rossingh
Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) -- At 16, Petra Kvitova was already one
of the best tennis players in her Czech Republic hometown. With
other teens competing abroad, she had little opportunity to
advance.
“I have two older brothers and my parents didn’t really
have money to travel,” Kvitova, now 24 and a two-time Wimbledon
champion, said in an interview. “We knew that if I wanted to
play better, I had to move somewhere else.”
She left her family home to join the Prostejov Tennis Club
84 kilometers (52 miles) away, whose owner, Miroslav Cernosek,
paid for her training and travel in return for a percentage of
future earnings and endorsements.
The arrangement worked. Cernosek remains the business
manager for Kvitova, who has won $15 million in prize money
since turning professional in 2006 and is seeded third at this
week’s U.S. Open.
The Czech is one young player who found a way to handle the
skyrocketing price of becoming an elite tennis professional. In
addition to talent and desire, it might cost about 250,000
pounds ($400,000) to develop a winning player from age 5 to 18,
according to the British Lawn Tennis Association.
The payoff is huge: The singles winners at the U.S. Open
will collect $3 million each of the total purse of $38 million.
The International Tennis Federation said it costs $40,000
for a 17-year-old boy to compete on the junior circuit for 20
weeks a year, up 13 percent from 2011. With prices like that,
junior players are increasingly dependent on help from parents,
national federations, sponsors or investors.
“Unless you are a very wealthy high-earner, or you’ve got
someone backing your child, it’s almost impossible to afford
such expenses,” said Phil Wright, father of 14-year-old British
player Marco Daniel Wright.

Portugal Move

The Wrights moved to Portugal to help pay for their son’s
career. At the national level in the U.K., Marco needed to play
international junior tournaments to boost his ranking. Instead
of attending a West London tennis academy -- where the family
was quoted an annual fee of 25,000 pounds ($42,000) -- he now
trains at a tennis club in Lisbon for less than one-sixth of
that.
“Now that my son has become this good, and he has the
opportunity to go to another level, the cost of getting to that
level is ridiculously high in England,” said Phil Wright, a
former semiprofessional soccer player who runs a technology
recruitment agency.
With the cost of playing on the pro tour estimated to be
$143,000 a year, according to a 2010 study by the U.S. Tennis
Association, there are plenty of players from privileged
backgrounds. Eugenie Bouchard, who lost to Kvitova in this
year’s Wimbledon final, is the daughter of a Canadian banker.
French Open men’s semifinalist Ernests Gulbis is the son of a
Latvian millionaire.

Murray’s Expense

Judy Murray, the mother of 2013 Wimbledon champion Andy
Murray and Britain’s Fed Cup coach, knows all about spiraling
costs. Her elder son, Jamie, also plays pro tennis, and is
currently ranked 31st in the world in doubles.
“When you get to the competitive stage in tennis, it does
become expensive,” Judy Murray said. “You have to travel quite
long distances to get decent competition.”
Getting more kids to play the game may reduce the financial
burden for parents, since local competition would cut down on
travel, she said.
“We have to build more public facilities to get more
people playing,” Murray said. “We need to build a bigger and
stronger workforce right across the board, not just at the
grassroots level but at performance level as well so that when
more kids are starting to come through, we actually know what
we’re doing with them.”

Avoiding Dysfunction

Mark Petchey, a former British tennis pro who coached Andy
Murray when he was a teenager, agreed.
“It’s got to be local at that age, because it keeps the
kids in the game and it keeps parents from becoming completely
and utterly dysfunctional about this sport,” Petchey said.
South Africa-based Petchey, whose tennis-playing children
are about to begin playing international events, said he’s
shocked by the cost even with him helping out with their
coaching. His two daughters receive no help from their
underfunded national tennis federation.
Still, organizations such as the lawn tennis association --
which has annual revenue of 58 million pounds -- shouldn’t spend
too much on young players, while kids who do well should pay
some of the money back to be reinvested into grass-roots tennis,
Petchey said.
“There is far too much given to too few by a lot of these
federations around the world that forces other parents to go
search out other ways of trying to make a living,” he said.

Williams Sisters

Even with the expense, it’s possible to be successful
without spending a fortune. Two of the most dominant players of
their generation learned to play on dilapidated public courts.
Defending U.S. Open champion Serena Williams and her older
sister Venus -- who have won a combined 24 major singles titles
-- were taught the game in Compton, California, where their
father and coach, Richard, kept the courts free of drug dealers.
They never played on the junior circuit.
Fernando Soler, managing director of the tennis division of
talent agency IMG that represents tennis stars including Kvitova
and Maria Sharapova, called on parents to be realistic.
“It’s very difficult to get to the top,” he said. “Only
a few of them are going to make it. You’d better make sure that
your kids continue to study and have a plan B in place in case
things don’t work out as expected.”

Four Hours

At the Clube Escola Tenis Oeiras in Lisbon, Marco Daniel
Wright plays four hours a day at a cost of 400 euros ($533) a
month. He occasionally practices with Federico Gil, a pro once
ranked 62nd on the men’s tour, and gets help from the Portuguese
federation with wild cards into tournaments.
“I don’t sit here and claim he’s going to be the next
world No. 1,” his father said. “He’s got potential to be a
successful professional player. The pathway for success is that
there has to be some help somewhere, especially if a player is
showing potential and the parents aren’t super-rich. The player
needs to be given an opportunity. It’s up to them to take it.”