News & Features

The inaugural Prince Plugged In (PPI) World Team Championships have come and gone, and the first academy name is now engraved on the World Championship team trophy. In four years, the ground-breaking PPI program has revolutionized junior competition, training, education and overall development, by connecting nearly fifty of the world's most elite high-performance tennis academies into one seamless network both on the courts and on-line.

Last week, for the first time in the program's history, Prince brought together five of the world's most elite junior training academies to Rome for a week of competition, training, education and cultural exchanges - a way for academies to measure themselves against other parts of the world and to truly determine which academy deserves the title "best of the best".

Competing were:

• United States PPI Champion: T Bar M Academy, Dallas, Texas
• Spain PPI Champion: Tenis Val, Valencia, Spain
• Italy PPI Champion: Club Sant' Agnese, Rome, Italy
• United Kingdom PPI Champion: Totally Tennis, Basingstoke, England
• United States PPI Runner-Up: IMG/Bollettieri Academy, Bradenton, Florida

It was an incredible experience from both an on- and off-court development perspective. Aside from the team competition, Prince arranged for special guest speakers, training sessions for the kids, trips to Rome's historic sites, and tickets to the Italian Open where the academies sat courtside to watch their favorite touring pros. Overall, Prince brought together more than sixty kids and coaches to the event. To put things in perspective, fifteen of the seventeen kids traveling from the United States had never been to Europe before!