Are Covered Courts The Answer To Finding The New Bianca Andreescu?

While Canada's Bianca Andreescu continued to be the toast of New York after her U.S. Open victory on Saturday, making appearances Monday on Good Morning America, The View, Live with Kelly and Ryan and The Tonight Show, officials back in Toronto were trying to seize on this opportunity: How to create the new Bianca Andreescu?

The broadcast of the final on TSN in Canada was watched by more than 2.5 million people, which is a huge number for tennis in the country.

Tennis Canada CEO Michael Downey is spearheading a plan to find new tennis stars in the country, and he thinks the answer lies in building more covered tennis courts to bring out more players in the winter months.

Downey said there are only 750 accessible covered courts in the whole country. By accessible, he means courts where average people can afford to play. Not the private clubs.

On a per capita basis, that's one covered court for 50,000 people. The U.S. is one court for 25,000 people and the weather is better than Canada's. France and Spain and Italy are in the one-to-5,000-range.

"We are one of the worst performing countries," Downey said.

"What we want is to convince municipalities in this country to invest in covered courts. What we're talking about is temporary bubbles. You can put a bubble over six outdoor courts for about $2 million Canadian dollars. That's still a fair bit of money. A hockey rink might cost $20 million."

Downey's pitch is that if a city builds a tennis center, and it's well run, they can make over $20,000 a year per court in rental fees. It's not like a swimming pool that continually needs to be underwritten on operating costs.

Tennis Canada doesn't have $2 million per project, so the organization is looking for a sponsor who will put in $200,000 for naming rights.

"But there's no doubt that if I went out tomorrow and visited a municipality and sat with the mayor, I would get a hell of a lot more interest because Bianca won," Downey said.

"The inspiration created by Bianca raises the profile and the interest. And guess what? In some of those small towns, when they get covered courts, there will be another Bianca or Felix Auger-Aliassime or Denis Shapovalov."

Downey said that "if we don't advocate for covered courts, no one will. That's the mission we've got now. And 10 or 20 years from now, if we've got a lot more covered courts, we're going to have a lot more high-performance players."

Canada's pool is so small because there are so few indoor courts, he said.

"We basically have a pool of about a couple of thousand kids across the country," Downey said, "which is unbelievably small.

"But our conversion in this country is off the charts. To think that this nation probably has three of the top teenagers in the world and the pool of talent is so small. Not because there is disinterest in the sport. Just because they can't play year round."

Once bright stars are identified, they can be funneled into Tennis Canada's high performance program.

In many cases with tennis prodigies, parents have been the first coaches and like to control their child's career. But that hasn't been the case with like Bianca or Milos Raonic.

Bianca's parents, who came to Canada from Romania with a couple of suitcases in their hands, have handed the coaching responsibilities to Tennis Canada and they in turn have put Sylvain Bruneau in charge.

Raonic's parents were not his coaches either.

That's what makes coaching stars like Andreescu and Raonic so much easier because the parents are not trying to micro manage them and they have the right support, Downey explained.

"They are not there to worry about their backhand and serve," Downey said. "That's for the experts to do."

Pam Shriver, a U.S. Open finalist in 1978 as a teenager and now a TV analyst, believes that coaching can be a steadying influence on young stars and help provide the sustainability that is lacking, especially among women players.

Except for Serena Williams, it's been a revolving door at the top of the women's game for some time. Sloane Stephens caught lightning in a bottle two seasons ago and Naomi Osaka won two straight Grand Slams and then changed coaches, which caught the tennis world by surprise.

"There have been a lot of strange coaching changes," Shriver told Prime Time Sports radio in Toronto. "Developmentally, it's really important to be locked into a team and you're not transitioning every four to six months. A lot of these young WTA players have had great success and they keep changing coaches."

The former tennis star said she's heard that Bruneau, Andreescu's coach, has a "great head on his shoulders and is a great tennis mind."

Every partnership is going to have its ups and downs, but, Shriver said, she hopes that partnership stands the test of time.

Shriver also said proper coaching and training staff can help players avoid injuries and overcome them faster when they arise.

Andreescu, of course, battled shoulder injuries this year. She had to withdraw from the Miami Open early in the tournament in March and also pulled out of the French Open after winning her opening match. She missed the entire grass-court season and didn't return to competitive tennis until the Rogers Cup last month.

"Shoulder injuries can be the devil unless you really manage them properly," Shriver said. "The unknown things are how her body can sustain her physicality, her power and the power in the game today," Shriver said.

The other x-factor is how Bianca will handle the sudden success when others have faded in similar situations.

Shriver told Toronto sports radio that Bianca seems to have "something extra" that others didn't have when they sank in the rankings.

"She seems to have a sense of belief, a sense of belonging at the top," the tennis analyst said.

Much of that belief owes to Tennis Canada's high-performance program, which came on stream several years ago with the establishment of a training hub in Montreal and satellite centers in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary.