High Performance Mini-Camp Blog

Herrmann Tennis Academy
High Performance Mini-Camp Blog
10s & 12s
January 15 – 17, 2010

Click here for camp Video

With our club’s busy permanent court time and tournament schedule this was our first opportunity to host a Mini-Camp this season. I immediately knew that I wanted to get former USTA Director of Men’s Tennis Rodney Harmon back to HTA. Coach Harmon had been to the Academy last year for a Mini Camp with our Boys’ 16s & 18s, and I was excited about him getting to spend some time with our talented “future stars.”

Friday, January 15th - The camp officially kicked off with all 22 participants joining Rodney for an on court session on “Beating the Pusher – A Lesson in Taking the Ball on the Rise”. After the talk, the juniors were placed on four individual teams for our Davis Cup Competition. The teams were Northwestern (coached by Alums Paul Wei & Jackie Jenkins), Michigan (Van King), Texas (my alma mater), and Tennessee (Rodney’s School).


The weekend team competition was formatted very similar to Zonals with singles, doubles, and mixed doubles matches taking place.

HTA Director Ernie Katko spoke to the participants about their recent wins and losses, and if they or their opponents caused the result. Katko’s presentation, entitled “Winning Matches through Game Analysis,” set the tone for the entire weekend as each player was instructed to make specific notes of his or her opponents’ strengths and weaknesses.

We played until 9pm and told everyone to get a good night rest for our nine hour day on Saturday.

Saturday, January 16th – We began the day with a video match presentation on winning patterns of play. Rodney, the 2008 USA Olympic Coach, broke down footage of the James Blake vs. Roger Federer Beijing Olympics match and discussed the changes Blake made in his game to win. The kids were very impressed and asked various questions on tactics, strategies, and the reactions both players were having during the match.

One of the most popular segments of the camp followed as Rodney broke down the draw and picked his favorites for the Australian Open. Unfortunately his streak of correctly picking the champion only lasted a single year as his 2010 favorite Nikolay Davydenko fell in the quarterfinals. Afterwards we started our hitting session with two hours of live ball drills, followed by lunch and a FAST SERVE Contest won by Max McKinnon (95mph).

Our afternoon session saw the players compete for their respective teams and competition was fierce!

Later that evening at 6:30 we had a pizza party and everyone was ready to get some rest.

Sunday, January 17th – 8am comes fast. We started off our session with Rodney presenting “Exploiting Your Opponent’s Weakness”. Several interesting topics were discussed here from analyzing your opponents grips, to finishing off the mid court ball. We finished our morning session with final Davis Cup matches.

Throughout the weekend each of the players filled their camp notebooks with insights they recorded during and after match play, they also took detailed notes on how our topics related to their individual games. We hope the campers all share this vital information with their personal coaches.

All players were given a group photo to remember their experience on court with Rodney.

Special Thanks goes to former HTA Advisor Paul Torricelli for his talk on “Does Your Child Aspire to Play Collegiate Tennis”, and current HTA coach Van King’s talk on “Lessons in Parenting a Junior Player”.

It was a terrific weekend with lots of great tennis and information discussed. I enjoyed meeting the players that came in from across the Midwest. We’ve got some very talented kids in the Midwest coming through the ranks!!