While I hope you’ll be making regular visits to The Tennis Mom for information on parenting a competitive junior tennis player, there are several other websites and blogs that I think all tennis parents should know about and/or be subscribed to for updates.
In this list you’ll find some real tennis industry experts, all of whom are great sources of information. While I’m proud of the little niche The Tennis Mom fills, offering peer support to other tennis parents, the sites listed below will keep you informed on other crucially important aspects of the junior game.
Zoo Tennis
My personal favourite. Run by writer/editor Colette Lewis, Zootennis.com focuses on the news and happenings in junior and college tennis. By subscribing to her daily news updates, articles and more, and following her on Twitter, I’ve learned more about what’s happening competitively, than anywhere else. Want to know what junior or college players are tops? Interested in knowing who you should be watching out for? Colette’s the one to ask. She also covers several tournaments live each year. Definitely someone I’ll be sending a media kit to once my daughter starts playing bigger tournaments! A really great site. Subscribe for her daily updates.
Tennis Recruiting
Hoping your child will be recruited by your alma mater or another top college? Then Tennisrecruiting.net is definitely a site you need to register with. Taken from their about page: “TennisRecruiting.net provides services and content to three distinct audiences: (1) juniors hoping to play college tennis, (2) college coaches trying to identify recruits, and (3) tennis enthusiasts interested in the recruiting process. The heart of TennisRecruiting.net content is the weekly rank lists. Two sets of rank lists – the College Recruiting Lists and TennisRPI – are updated weekly for both boys and girls.”
College Tennis Online
Another great college news site. Focused on American colleges. Lots of news stories and features and includes a full complement of rankings. Allows high school players and juniors to submit their resumes and information into the CollegeTennisOnline database, which will be searchable by coaches.
ITF Tennis Juniors
I really like the Junior section of the ITF website. Besides the news and rankings, the site also houses junior player profiles and lists all ITF tournaments from Grade 5 to 1 and all Grade A tournaments around the world. Definitely a site I can see myself using with a daughter who is a dual Canadian/German citizen and who is spending more and more time in Florida and in Europe training. Rules, policies, info on turning pro, the site has a lot of information for parents trying to get a handle on what’s out there for their junior player to do.
Junior tennis.com
Another terrific site where juniors can register themselves as of the age of 13. Tournament listings and results from around the world, news articles, sports science info and a searchable database of tennis camps around the world. With a college directory and coaching profiles, this site is a treasure chest of information. I did notice however that the forums didn’t seem to have recent activity and Tennis Canada hadn’t updated their tournament listings for 2010, but this is definitely a site you can sink your teeth into and learn stuff.
Tennis Information
It probably doesn’t matter to you, but I love the way this site looks! It’s just got a great design that makes me happy to go there. More importantly it has a great listing of tournaments across the U.S. and a searcheable player database. Still a work in progress I believe as several sections are still not active but definitely on The Tennis Mom watch list.
College and Junior Tennis
Kind of hard to figure out in terms of navigation, but this site has lots of cool things to click on. For example, results from the 2009 Little Mo, an article on who’s turning pro and who’s off to college and more. Could use a little bit more organization but I’m a digger so I don’t mind clicking my way around to find interesting stuff.
In closing… One thing I noticed as I compiled this list is that there’s a real North American focus to it. While I speak English and French and understand a fair bit of German, I’ve not come across any significant junior tennis sites from elsewhere in the world. I certainly welcome your input if you think I missed a good one.
Please send me your list of top tennis sites that parents of competitive junior players should know about. The more we share, the more our children have the advantage.
http://www.collegecoachlink.com is a service that provides an easy and quick way to get a players name and contact information in front of coaches and ask them to take a look at you. You can also direct them to your online profiles and videos. They have email contacts with pretty much every coach in the US in every division.
Thanks for the list of helpful sites. Another great one is MyTennisNetwork.com. This one helps you keep track of tournaments, deadlines, and gives some good information on tournament rankings, and really creates a community for tennis players and their parents.