Adam Neff’s parents — both doctors — didn’t want to send him away to a tennis academy, so they built their own:
When Adam was 7, they visited an academy in France that wanted Adam to live there.
“I said no, that’s my buddy, he’s coming home with me,” Adam’s father said. Then the Neffs got to thinking: They wanted to move to Florida, where they had trained to become doctors. A friend introduced them to Luciani, who had worked at Nick Bollettieri’s academy for nine years and was now teaching privately.
“I just said, wait a second here, let’s completely change the way we’re thinking of this—let’s go out to the country and build the mountain,” Ann said. “The amount that we would have spent to buy a nice house in some community somewhere, we can put in our own courts.”
The Neffs bought the property in 2011. They built an addition to the house and cleared the yard, which was overrun by palmettos, scorpions and snakes. The three courts will cost around $160,000. They pay Luciani for private coaching; he maintains the facility and the CVAC pod, which he leased for $110,000 for five years, he said.
Luciani teaches Adam, Adam’s 10-year-old sister, Katarina, and Lancelot full-time, and several others part-time, with the help of his stepdaughter, Emily Mowery, a former player at the University of Miami. The youngest Neff, 5-year-old Isabella, recently hit her first ball—”She knocked the glasses off my face,” Luciani said—and will start training with him soon. He’s considering other students, but doesn’t want to have more than eight.
“It’s more a center for private coaching than an academy,” he said.
Adam and Katarina are home-schooled in the Kumon curriculum by a tutor. Adam also takes French and Spanish. They study between and after practice sessions.
When I started watching the video, I expected him to look… better.