Eight kids, six of them girls, formed a half-moon beside the blue-green court, wide-eyed and edgy. In their midst stood two coaches, who spoke with deep passion about tennis, grit, intensity, values, Mallorca and the man who strings all of them together with perfection, Rafa Nadal.
Holding tennis clinics for the first time in India across three cities - Bengaluru, New Delhi and Mumbai - the Rafa Nadal Academy, only in its second year, is here to spread the word. Under overcast skies at the Bengaluru Club, coaches Aitor Reparaz Illa and Raduan El Chouaibi warmed the kids up to a coaching exhibition.
Much to their dismay, late afternoon showers ruled out any on-court sessions and had the teens shuffling into a narrow room upstairs instead. They were taken on a short, guided tour of the academy, its facilities (27 courts and 2 swimming pools), and work ethic through a short video which then wound down with slides of Nadal, baseline-grinding, backhand-flinging, stolidly raising his fists to the sky, falling to his knees, swallowing defeat, picking himself up again and wrapping Roger Federer in a warm embrace with the closing thought of rivalries lasting only as long as a match filling the bottom half of the screen.
"Rafa may not have the best backhand or the best forehand in the world," said Aitor, addressing the thin congregation of attentive teens and parents, "but what sets him apart is his mentality and values. You won't find Rafa throwing his racket or behaving poorly with his opponent. So our academy mirrors that philosophy and it's focused on not just creating good tennis players but shaping good tennis players into great human beings."
The coaches then went about getting the kids, sitting cross-legged on the floor and slipping into a reverie, to their feet. Each of them was asked to pick their best shot (six out of eight went with their forehand) and demonstrate it. Rackets came flying out of bags and the teens lined up neatly.
"If you have a strength," Aitor spoke into the din of the rain splattering onto the courts below, "maximize it. So if you have a good forehand as most of you say you do, try to cover the whole court with it, turn it into a weapon. Try to build an identity with it. At our academy for instance, we show kids who have a good forehand, videos of players who are famed for that strength like Juan Martin Del Petro. Next time you watch a tennis match on TV, watch out for these things. Try to take note of a player's strength and style and see what you can learn from it."
Aitor and Raduan then took turns to station themselves at the far end of the room to throw down balls to players. Racket grip, footwork, swing and power were high up on the checklist and each of the kids were taken through a step-by-step tutorial of perfecting the inside-out forehand: shift body weight on to right side, move in a semi-circle motion to get into position to hit the ball and keep watch on the spacing between ball and body.
"At a young age, playing different sports will give you a wide variety of skills," says Aitor, "Rafa, for instance, loves to play golf. So don't just stick to tennis, play as many sports as you can. It will help you grow as an athlete."
The Mallorca academy runs both annual programs, between September and June and summer camps in July and August every year, apart from weekly programs. The annual program is priced at 56,000 euros (roughly INR 45 lakhs) for offering kids both tennis lessons and schooling at a residential facility.
"The idea," says the academy's business development manager Laia Tutzo, "is to offer kids the priceless experience of training alongside Nadal, who uses the same facility when he's in Mallorca. Right now we have 120 kids in our academy for the annual program drawn from 45 nationalities and for the summer program we have players from over 65 different countries. Only 10 per cent of the kids are from Spain. We just came from Japan, where we have a big community and at the beginning of the year we were in Mexico and China. We are also hosting a clinic in Germany led by Toni Nadal himself; so we are trying to enter as many territories."
"We know the cost is not one that every parent can afford and not every kid at the academy will go on to turn into a professional player, but the experience and life lessons will stay on with them. Adil Kalyanpur, who's from Bengaluru, is one of our best players. We also had another Indian boy, Dev Saraf, who graduated last year from our academy and is now in San Diego on a scholarship."
By the end of the session which lasted over an hour, the teens were spoilt for tips: Be it on playing the toss on first serve in front and second serve over the head or mimicking the act of putting an ear against the wristwatch in the double-handed backhand follow-through which finishes with the wrists by the dominant side ear.
No matter how many end up joining the program, most of them went back home feeling lucky to have got a rare taste of what goes into the making of a great.