“I had, like, maybe six, seven, eight hobbies that I was focusing on,” she said in a news conference. “It was never mainly tennis. I had all the gymnastics, all the horse riding, just all the sports in the world because my parents were very into any sort of movement.”
It doesn’t take an expert in parenting or athletic development to hear a lesson in all that. This is the era of youth sports specialization, of children being told to pick a sport (or to have one chosen for them) when they are barely starting school. Then they switch to home-schooling and build their lives around trying to become a future champion, even if the numbers are stacked against them.
Navratilova, who has had her own détente with her native country, said in an interview last year that girls who pursue tennis in the Czech Republic experience a different kind of coaching than the children she sees growing up in Florida, one of the world capitals of tennis development.
In the U.S., Navratilova, said, young players spend countless hours doing drills, learning how to bash a clean ball that’s fed to them by a coach standing next to shopping cart on the other side of the net. In the Czech Republic, she said, children are mostly playing points and games and sets from a young age.
From the beginning, they learn to construct points instead of simply hit balls. They learn to compete, through the ebbs and flows of sets and matches. They learn how to dissect an opponent with their own tools and skills. And they do it largely on clay, which only accelerates and exaggerates that development.
After beating Bartůňková, 20, who has the deceptive power to go with finesse that can make a player so dangerous, Krejčíková described what it’s like to develop in the world that Navratilova described.