What do the top young South African tennis players Zoe and Isabella Kruger, Lleyton Cronjé, Gabriella Broadfoot and the brothers Sipho and Kholo Montsi have in common?

Besides the fact that they all count among the best young tennis players from South Africa and are currently in action all over the world, the foundations of all these players’ tennis careers were laid at the tennis academy of Curro Hazeldean school in the east of Pretoria.

Zoe Kruger made a big breakthrough in her tennis career when she won her first ITF Pro title about eleven months ago during the Tuks International tournament in Pretoria.

Her little sister, Isabella Kruger, has already regularly beaten big names in ITF tournaments in recent years and this year at Junior Wimbledon she made her big breakthrough when she reached the quarter-finals.

Gabriella Broadfoot’s tennis has also improved dramatically since she started participating in international tournaments on a regular basis. She is 17 and based in Florida. She recently reached a memorable milestone of being ranked among the world’s top 100 junior girls.

Lleyton Cronjé won his first ITF tournament five years ago at the age of 17 in Morocco. Since then, he has mainly played College Tennis in America, where he is currently one of the outstanding players under the jurisdiction of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association.

Cronjé was at Virginia Commonwealth University after which the University of Central Florida recruited him, where he is such an outstanding player that South Africa’s current Davis Cup captain, Christo van Rensburg, approached him to represent his country in the just-concluded tournament against Bulgaria.

Then there are the Montsi brothers, who in the meantime have also broken through on the bigger stage, and who are currently playing in different tournaments around the world.

There can therefore be no doubt that Frans Cronjé and his team at the Curro Tennis Academy have already produced top players in a short time.

Curro Tennis operates with a very special dynamic programme that develops the skills of tennis players attending schools in the Curro group.  They help learners – even learners not enrolled at their schools – with inherent talent to grow into well-rounded players that are technically, tactically, and emotionally ready for competitive play. The learners often proceed to compete at national and international level.

The recent implementation of the new High-performance program now creates new opportunities for school children who decide at an early stage to take tennis very seriously.

With this program, learners can now be an intense part of the school’s sporting activities and still remain part of their world-class academic programme, without attending classes on the school grounds.

For the tennis academy, it means that players can get better attention if they stay in the spotlight. More tournaments will become available for them in Europe.

This new program is basically the Curro curriculum transformed so that students can work independently (at home).

Along with this, Curro Holdings has developed an online program for the tennis academy student who has to travel a lot and miss classes for long periods of time.

In practice, the new program will also form part of a structure that will prepare players to get comfortable on clay courts and the pressure of global junior tournaments.

For more information about this development at Curro Schools, call Cronjé on 083-269-4229 or send an email to frans.cronje@yahoo.in  .

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