{"id":43,"date":"2011-07-07T13:30:01","date_gmt":"2011-07-07T17:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/?p=43"},"modified":"2011-07-07T13:45:41","modified_gmt":"2011-07-07T17:45:41","slug":"young-american-tennis-players","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2011\/07\/07\/young-american-tennis-players\/","title":{"rendered":"Young American tennis players"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I periodically despair about the state of tennis in the US. For decades, we regularly produced a crop of world-class players, from\u00a0 Tilden and Vines and Budge and Kramer to Schroeder and Riggs and Gonzalez and Trabert to Ashe and Smith and Connors and McEnroe and Agassi and Sampras. And that&#8217;s just the men.<\/p>\n<p>But for the last ten years or more we haven&#8217;t had any truly first-rate players on the pro tour. The best we can come up with are players like Roddick and the Williams sisters, decent players but not true greats. So I&#8217;m always glad to see up-and-coming young players like Kiah.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"640\" height=\"390\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Akf8-fCrf50?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The video is from about a year ago, when she was still 15. She has several other videos posted, showing her serving and so on. Watching her play, I&#8217;d guess she&#8217;d play about even with most fair-to-middling 15-year-old male tennis players&#8211;those good enough to make the tennis team at a large high school&#8211;although that&#8217;ll change over the next couple of years, as the boys continue to get faster and stronger, while she doesn&#8217;t. If I&#8217;d played her when I was 15, I certainly wouldn&#8217;t have taken the match lightly. I&#8217;d probably have beaten her four matches in five, and maybe even five in five, but this girl has enough tools to be dangerous.<\/p>\n<p>I hope there are a whole lot more like her out there.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I periodically despair about the state of tennis in the US. For decades, we regularly produced a crop of world-class players, from\u00a0 Tilden and Vines and Budge and Kramer to Schroeder and Riggs and Gonzalez and Trabert to Ashe and Smith and Connors and McEnroe and Agassi and Sampras. And that&#8217;s just the men.<\/p>\n<p>But for the last ten years or more we haven&#8217;t had any truly first-rate players on the pro tour.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2011\/07\/07\/young-american-tennis-players\/\">&nbsp;&raquo;&nbsp;Read more about: Young American tennis players &nbsp;&raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}