British Tennis Magazine interview: Graeme Dyce
31st October 2006British Junior No.1 Graeme Dyce hasn’t looked back since he enrolled at the Bollettieri Academy in Florida a year ago. Judy Murray, his former coach and current manager, explains how Dyce is benefiting from his intensive programme at the centre that has produced so many great champions.
Graeme Dyce, the highest ranked British boy in the ITF junior rankings at the time of writing, is just one of around 600 boys and girls chasing their dream at the world’s most comprehensive playground for athletes in training.
In addition to 39 hard courts (four indoor), 16 green clay and one red clay court, the Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Florida has a state of the art 10,000-squre-foot strength training centre known as the IPI (International Performance Institute) complete with outdoor running track, artificial grass games pitch and sports therapy department.
While approximately 30 per cent of the full time students at the academy have at least one parent (and sometimes siblings) in tow, 17-year-old Dyce opted to leave his parents at home in Edinburgh when he took up a place on the tennis programme.
He has a great attitude, he works hard, competes hard. He moves well. He’s an all-courter – he can do everything. I like him.
Nick Bollettieri on Dyce
“I needed to develop some independence,” he says. “If I’m going to play on the men’s circuit I’ve got to learn how to look after myself. I need to get used to being away from home and mixing with players from other countries.”
I had coached Graeme since he was eight and it had been obvious to me after he won the British 15-and-under title in August 2004 that he was going to run out of training options in Scotland and would have to start looking for a more competitive environment if he was to fulfil his potential.
He was a fairly self-conscious teenager, so I guessed the upbeat atmosphere that goes with most things American would boost both his confidence and his tennis. I arranged for him to make his first two-week visit to the Bollettieri Academy in October 2004. He spent a further six weeks there training and competing with the Bollettieri junior squad at ITF events in the Caribbean in the summer of 2005.
He also did a 10-day stint at the Sanchez-Casal Academy in Barcelona last year in order to make a comparison, but chose Bollettieri’s partly because it was English speaking, but mainly because of the track record, the number of players and the variety of sports on campus.
So far the move is paying off, and Nick Bollettieri is a big supporter of the Scot. “Britain needs more players like Andy Murray, and Graeme is a street fighter like him,” he says. “He has a great attitude, he works hard, competes hard. He moves well. He’s an all-courter – he can do everything. I like him. He’s the type of boy I like to train. We’re working on building him up physically and developing some weapons around his serve and forehand.”
Graeme was happy to be able to escape from a country where tennis is very much a minority sport and where setting a performance programme and finding role models is easier said than done.
“In my last year at school, it was a nightmare trying to piece together my tennis and physical programme,” he says. “I was at school from 8.30am to 4pm then took a bus across Edinburgh to the tennis centre, then another to the gym. Then I’d have a shower before getting the bus home for food and homework.
“At Bollettieri’s everything I need is on site and there’s a huge variety of quality hitting partners, which was impossible to find in Scotland. And the weather is a whole lot better too, so I am able to train outdoors.”
There are 280 tennis players at the Academy and Graeme is in the ‘Top Gun’ elite group which includes his best friend and doubles partner Bradley Cox from America, Russian Pavel Chekhov and Kei Nishikori from Japan. Here there is no room for complacency.
“When I first came here, I was put into one of the lower groups and I’ve had to work really hard to prove myself,” he says. “What I like about the training is that I am being pushed all the time. At home I wasn’t hitting with such good players and it was relatively easy for me to dominate the play.
“This group is able to deal with my shots better and I’m having to work much harder to create chances in the rallies. My concentration has improved. So has my intensity and my footwork. In fact I think everything has gone up a level.”
To be able to compete successfully on the men’s tour, Graeme needs to be “stronger in both upper and lower body and faster around the ball” according to Yutaka Nakamura, the fitness trainer he shares with Max Mirnyi.
“The immediate focus, however, is on increasing flexibility in the shoulders and hips. He is going to be a big guy and he will have to be able to hit lots of big serves without risk of injury, so we are spending a lot of time on preparing his body to cope with this.”
Until last month Graeme was sharing a room with an English basketballer at the Academy’s off-site accommodation block, a five-minute shuttle bus ride from the main campus. But he has been moved into an on-site apartment where he rooms with Zach Gilbert, the 18-year-old son of Brad.
There are around 30 tennis coaches at the academy and Graeme currently comes under the expert eye of David ‘Red’ Ayme, who spent most of the last 12 years working on the tour with Tommy Haas.
“We spent the first couple of months getting him into good physical shape and working on a few technical things,” says Red. “We are raising the left hip on serve and elongating the follow-through on forehand and trying to get him to play closer to the baseline so he can attack more.
“At the beginning of this year he was really starting to build some momentum, making the quarters and semis of big ITF events in South America and breaking into the top 100 of the world junior rankings. Then he picked up a leg injury which kept him off court for nine weeks and that really affected his progress, his ranking and his confidence for quite a while.”
A recurrence of the leg injury in July stalled his progress for a further two weeks and he had to scratch from the Canadian Junior Open. As his ranking had dipped to 163 he only got into the qualifying for the boys’ singles at the US Open as an alternate.
The experience and inspiration to be gained from taking part in an event of this stature is immense – the kids share the player lounge and restaurant with the top pros – and although Graeme was beaten by a Russian in the final round of qualifying, “being there and being part of the US Open was phenomenal” and it whetted his appetite for the game even more.
He returned to Bradenton and joined an Academy trip to an ITF Group 1 event in Kentucky the following week. As he hadn’t entered, he needed a wild card into the qualifying event and won through three matches to make the main draw. From there he won a further five matches to make the final, beating three seeded players all ranked between 44 and 59. He lost in three sets in the final but his efforts earned him 100 ranking points and took him back up to 103 in the ITF list.
“My plan for the winter is to try to pick up my first ATP point so that in 2007 I can mix the major junior events with the men’s Futures and Satellite circuits.”
Graeme will remain at the Academy for the next training year as Bollettieri offered him a full scholarship to June 2007. He is one of a dozen youngsters on full scholarships and it has been great for his confidence to know that one of the world’s top coaches is prepared to back him.
Although Graeme is clearly aiming for a career in pro tennis, he is aware that very few players reach a level where they can make a living and that nothing is guaranteed. So he plans to sit the Scholastic Aptitude Test early next year to give himself the option of taking up a tennis scholarship at an American college or university in the future.
Graeme Dyce Factfile
Born: Edinburgh, Scotland
DOB: 24 July 1989
Lives: Edinburgh and Bradenton, Florida
Highest ITF junior ranking: 98 (25 September 2006)
Career highlights:
2004: Won National 15-and-under singles
2005: Won St Maarten Junior Open, Netherlands Antilles; RU ITF Junior Cup, Copenhagen
2006: Won doubles at Copa Graiman, Ecuador with Bradley Cox; SF Condor de Plata, La Paz, Bolivia; RU Scottish Junior International, Edinburgh; SF International Flower Bulb Tournament, Hillegorn, Netherlands; RU Kentucky International Junior Tennis Derby, Lexington.