A junior tennis academy on twelve courts, six clay and six hard. Four level groups, five USPTA-certified coaches, and a tournament team that travels the regional USTA circuit. We're picky about who we accept and proud of who they become.
We sort by ability, age, and commitment — never just age. Most players join at one level and graduate up. The four-group structure is the backbone of every part of the academy: weekly programming, camps, tournaments, recruiting cycles.
Red-ball and orange-ball court sizes. Coordination, racquet familiarity, footwork games. Two practice sessions a week, fun-first, no scoring pressure. The level where a kid learns to love the game.
Green-ball into yellow. Full-court tennis, all five strokes, an introduction to scoring and match play. Three sessions a week with optional in-house ladder match Saturdays.
Tournament-track. Yellow ball at full court. USTA-sanctioned junior tournaments enter the calendar. Match-play emphasis, periodized strength program, video review. Required tournament minimum: six per season.
Recruiting-grade. Five sessions a week, full periodization, college-recruiting timeline support, mental-game program, travel team eligibility. Tournament minimum: twelve sanctioned, plus regional travel circuit.
Try-outs run the first Saturday of September, January, and May. Bring your player in court attire with their racquet — we supply ball-machines and the coaching panel. The assessment runs ninety minutes; placement decisions follow within forty-eight hours.
Mariella came to coaching after a four-year college career and a brief WTA tour run that crested at world number 287 in 2009. She founded the Topspin academy in 2011 with a simple thesis: that the players who go furthest are the ones who learn to compete before they learn to win. Fourteen seasons in, the thesis still holds.
She runs the Performance and Elite squads personally and leads tournament-team travel six weekends a year. She has placed twenty-eight juniors into college programs and has a quietly excellent track record with the players who arrived at the academy after being told elsewhere they weren't quite enough.
Every session ends with point play. Even Future Stars do five-minute mini-set rotations. Junior tennis builds on competitive reps, not just stroke production. Players who only drill struggle to translate to a match.
We coach by the point, not the stroke. Players are accountable for the construction of a point — not just hitting a clean ball. This shifts the conversation from "your forehand looked good" to "what were you trying to do."
Tournaments aren't trophies. They're feedback. Every Performance and Elite player keeps a tournament log. We review them in person every six weeks. The match score is the start of the conversation, never the end.
My son arrived at twelve, mid-pack in the section. Three seasons later he's a top-25 sectional and a committed college recruit. The pacing was the difference.
Topspin doesn't pretend everyone's elite. They told us where our daughter actually was at six and built from there. Two years in, she runs to practice.
Apply through the form. We confirm a slot for the next quarterly try-out — September, January, or May — and send a ninety-minute schedule the week before. Your player meets the coaching panel for stroke and live-ball assessments and a short match-play segment. Placement decisions arrive in forty-eight hours.