With Andy Murray having recently turned thirty and being much closer to the end of his career than the beginning, there has been much talk of whether enough has been done in Scotland to capitalise on the world No.1’s success and create a legacy that will remain long after he hangs up his racket.
While it is unlikely that we will see a player of the calibre of Murray in the coming years, there have been glimmers of potential from young Scottish players with the most recent success being Hamish Stewart’s gold medal at the Commonwealth Youth Games last month. While Stewart would, no doubt, love to emulate Murray’s career, he is not copying the path Murray took to the top of the tennis rankings which was, of course, moving to Spain at the age of 15 in order to play tennis full-time.
Instead, Stewart will, this month, embark on a tennis scholarship in America which, he hopes, will be a platform to further success. The 18 year-old Glaswegian has been signed by Tulane University in New Orleans and will forge his way in the college system rather than turn pro while still a teenager.
It is, for a Scottish tennis player anyway, a fairly unusual move but the signs are that it could, potentially, be an inspired choice. College sport in America is legendary for its levels of professionalism, strength-in-depth and quality. Both college football (of the American kind) and basketball matches attract crowds of thousands, or even tens of thousands, and the athletes enjoy support that is on a par with anything the majority of professional athletes experience.
What I like about Stewart’s decision is the acknowledgement that an athletic career does not need to be embarked upon to the exclusion of all else. There is an assumption by many up-and-coming athletes that the answer to all their problems is to become a full-time athlete yet it is, in no way, shape or form, as straightforward as this. To have sport as your one and only focus is not always the best solution, particularly when still a teenager and, as Laura Muir has demonstrated in recent years by combining her degree in veterinary medicine with a world-class athletic career, it is possible to do both.
At Tulane University, Stewart will have the best of both worlds. He will have the use of top-notch facilities while simultaneously gaining an education and having a distraction from sport. It is easy to look at players like Murray, Maria Sharapova and Rafa Nadal who turned professional as teenagers and have been hugely successful. But they are the exception rather than the rule. For a significant number of athletes, focusing solely on sport before they even enter their twenties is just too much to handle.
Stewart’s fellow Scot, Cameron Norrie, is a case in point. The South African-born tennis player was a hugely promising junior but after moving to the UK as a 16 year-old in order to train full-time at the National Tennis Centre in Roehampton, he fell out of love with the sport. “It was just too much for me to take on board - everything was about tennis and I wasn’t used to that,” he said. So, he applied to college in America in order, he said, to have “ a more balanced lifestyle and a normal life.”
The decision appears to have worked for Norrie, with the Scot ending the last academic year as the best college tennis player in America. He has now left college to give tennis a real go but has spoken about how he matured during college and is now far more prepared for real life.
There are a number of American tennis players currently riding high in the world rankings who honed their trade in the college system, including John Isner and Steve Johnson who are 19th and 37th respectively in the world rankings, with both believing that college tennis equipped them better than anything else could have to cope with the demands of the professional circuit.
With tennis players peaking later and later these days, there is, surely, no rush to get on the circuit full-time. An education is always a sensible fall-back but more than anything there is, for most, something slightly suffocating about becoming a full-time athlete while still a teenager. It will be interesting to see how Stewart’s stint at Tulane University pans out. If things go to plan though, he could well open many other British players’ eyes to what is, in my view, the best option out there for young players at the moment.
AND ANOTHER THING…
The announcement earlier this week that GB will take on America in an international athletics event called “The Meet” next year struck me as a bit of a gimmick. But, for all of athletics’ faults, no one can criticise them for not using their imagination to attempt to grow the sport. The World Championships last week was an overwhelming success and it would have been easy for those at the helm to allow complacency to set in and assume that people will come out and watch whenever scandals rock the sport.
“The Meet” may or may not be a success in the long run but if athletics continues work this hard to reinvent itself, the bad news stories may not do quite as much damage as many feared.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here