TENNIS EUROPE JUNIOR TOUR 25 HISTORY
Tennis Europe Junior Tour introducing the stars of tomorrow since 1990
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any thousands of players have taken part in the Tennis Europe Junior Tour since it was founded in 1990. Many were playing just for fun; others were on a path to becoming some of the world’s most recognisable sports stars. Whatever your goal, playing on the Tennis Europe Junior Tour is a unique and valuable experience and puts you on a path followed by some of the world’s biggest sports stars. Over the next few pages, we look back at the history of the Tour, talking to some of the future stars that emerged, and looking back at some of the incredible achievements of the Tour’s best-known participants.
The Beginnings During its early years, the nascent Junior Tour was a far cry from the smooth, well-oiled calendar which is the default route into the pros for any talented junior with big aspirations and from which players from can pick tournaments to enter with the click of a mouse button. Rather, it was a selection of events from various European countries brought somewhat haphazardly under one umbrella in order to bring a semblance of order to the tournaments that were increasingly important in nurturing future professionals. Still, the quality of players it attracted was evident even from its first years. At the end of 1990, the first year that Tennis Europe began to produce weekly rankings, the girls’ 14 & Under and 16 & Under lists were topped by Yugoslavia’s Iva Majoli and Romania’s Irina Spirlea respectively. Both capped their year off by winning the European Junior Championships in their respective divisions impressively, Majoli also managed to play up and still win a title at June’s tournament in Nettuno, Italy, where she beat future top 100 player Catalina Cristea, of Romania, in the final. Both Majoli and Spirlea would go on to great things as pros. Majoli, of course, was responsible for halting the Martina Hingis juggernaut of 1997 to take home that year’s Roland Garros title - becoming the first Croatian Slam champion in history, just six years
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after the Balkan state gained independence. It was one of eight WTA titles Majoli, who would peak at No 4 in the world, would win. To date, Goran Ivanisevic (Wimbledon 2001) and Marin Cilic (US Open 2014) have joined her, but Majoli was the trailblazer - and it all began here, a year before her country even existed. Spirlea, meanwhile, would reach a career high of 7 and win four WTA titles. Her biggest splash, though, was a run to the US Open semi-finals in 1997, when she collected the scalps of teenage sensation Anna Kournikova and legend of the sport Monica Seles en route before falling to Venus Williams in a third-set tiebreak. Notable winners of the tour’s inaugural year also included future Roland Garros finalist and world No 2 Alex Corretja, of Spain, whose run to the Barcelona 16 & Under boys’ title culminated in a three-set win over France’s Pascal Lasserre, the year-ending No 1 in that category. It was a measure of revenge for Lasserre’s crucial win over Corretja earlier that summer to give
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1 . Paraguay’s Rosanna de los Rios was one of the first South American players to make an impact on the Tennis Europe Junior Tour. 2 . Thomas Johansson collects the 16 & Under Avvenire title, eleven years prior to his famous Australian Open win. 3 . Alex Corretja played a key role in many of Spain’s team successes in the early 1990s.
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France victory in the final of the Borotra Cup team competition. Presaging her Junior Roland Garros title two years later, Paraguay’s Rossana de los Rios - who, many years later, would later put together an impressive post-motherhood Tour career - stormed to the title in May’s 16 & Under girls’ competition in Reggio Emilia, Italy. De los Rios’s win illustrated that, from the start, Tennis Europe’s Junior Tour was not only a platform for European players. Contingents and ITF teams from North and South America, Australia and Asia would make the trip for certain groups of tournaments - and often, they’d make their presence felt in a big way.
June’s 16 & Under event in Torino, Italy, wound up with an all-Argentinian boys’ final (in which Lucas Arnold beat Gaston Etlis) and an all-Paraguayan girls’ final (Viviana Valdovinos triumphed over Sandra Ugarriza). Two weeks later, the 14 & Under tournament in Messina, Italy saw an Argentinian sweep, with Federico Browne and Paola Suarez both eliminating European rivals to take the crowns. July’s 14 & Under tournament in Nijverdal, Netherlands, would see an Australian boys’ winner, Allen Belobrajdic, and a Japanese girls’ finalist, Yuka Yoshida. The globalisation and diversity of the sport would be one of its greatest themes over the upcoming two decades, and the seeds were being planted here, helping to raise the level not just in Europe, but all over the world. As Rohana Mohanescu, Romania’s 14 & Under team coach, told us: “Every country, every continent comes with something new. As a coach that’s very important because you can see the level of the other players and compare it to the level of your players.”
The early years In subsequent years, the Junior Tour began to take on a more defined structure - providing the opportunity for outstanding talents to seize control. The story of 1991 was a young prodigy whose results at just 11 years of age made a nonsense of the carefully segregated age categories. The legendary ‘Swiss Miss’
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