Juan Carlos Ferrero academy - a review

I attended the “adultos” program at the Juan Carlos Ferrero (JCF) academy for a week in September 2025. I loved it.

My review has two parts. In the first, I share reasons why I enjoyed the program, and why the same may lead others to not. The second covers logistics and miscellanea.

What I loved and you may hate

Spanish Tennis

Why are the Spanish so good at tennis? Facile answers include “tennis is popular so all their best athletes play” and “they grow up on clay, clay is harder, and so they’re better.” These are plausible, but unsatisfying.

A year ago I read Chris Lewit’s “Secrets of Spanish Tennis” and got a more satisfying answer. On groundstrokes, the Spanish tradition emphasizes players have one job: generate racquet-head speed through the correct contact point. Everything else is in service to this. Almost counterintuitively, this means they place a strong emphasis on footwork, balance, and spacing, since these are the greatest constraints on consistently generating speed. If you don’t see this, imagine trying to punch someone. Can you throw a faster one with both feet on the ground, or on one foot? What about leaning forward vs. leaning back? What if the person is inches away from your face rather than arm’s length? ¹

The way they teach footwork, balance, and spacing is through drills. Lots of drills. The prototypical Spanish drill is a coach hand-feeding balls to a student from the same side of the court and putting them in uncomfortable positions. Lewit talks about the Brughera “X” drill where a student is fed a deep ball pushing them back, and the next ball is between service and base line. The coach then alternates forehands and backhands, running the student in an “X” pattern, never giving them a standard “rally ball” from just behind the baseline. Hand-feeding (vs. racquet-feeding) is necessary because it forces the student to generate their own pace, hence racquet-head speed.

Walk around JCF and everyone is doing creative variations on these drills. They are so central that it’s rare to see anyone playing points. The typical court has two players, one being hand-fed balls, and the other picking them up on the other side. Some favorite drills include: running to the deuce side, catching a ball with your right hand, then being pressed on the ad-side to hit a defensive backhand; alternating being fed deep and short inside-out forehands on the ad side, recovering to the middle each time; starting with your back to the feeder and being tossed a ball either short/deep on the duece/ad side. When the feeder says “go” you’re supposed to turn around, find the ball, and hit it.

A consequence of the Spanish realizing tennis is more of a “movement and spacing sport” rather than a “ball striking” sport is that they’re more agnostic on technique. If someone asks for coaching on their forehand, they’re expecting tips on what to do with their upper-body (”raise your elbow, change your grip, etc…”). Coaches in other “traditions” may provide that by default. However, beyond a baseline competence in technique (think > 4.0 USTA), a Spanish-influenced coach may respond “yes, let’s work on your forehand. Here’s a movement drill to develop your spacing since you’re too close to the ball.”

Some will struggle with this framing. We sometimes think “learning tennis” means hearing a bunch of tips and tricks and translating those into body movements. No doubt part of tennis is learned this way. Yet, there is another (arguably larger) part that skips words and phrases altogether and is developed by your body “figuring out” how to move, how to see, and how to swing. A good coach can help your body “figure it out” by challenging it in specific ways. Hugh Clark has given an example of how Dominic Thiem’s coach shortened his forehand backswing by rushing the shot in practice.

I partly came to JCF because I had a prior idea of what “Spanish tennis” was and wanted to experience it. I left the program a convert. What I’ve described is hard work, but I think it’s definitely effective.² I (subjectively) think I improved over the week and have a base of drills I can use to keep improving.

Tennis Monasticism

At JCF you will eat, breath, and sleep tennis. The morning session starts at 9:30am and lasts until 11am. The afternoon session begins at 3:30 and lasts until 5. Your time in between is either spent warming up to play tennis, cooling down after tennis, sweeping the clay courts for the next players, eating to provide energy for tennis, or sleeping so you can play tennis tomorrow.

Bluntly, there is little else to do at JCF. The closest town is Villena (pronounced “Vienna”), which is 7 miles away. JCF is surrounded by scrublands, olive trees, and a property with several loud dogs. There is a beautiful garden by the hotel rooms where you can stroll among the olive trees and think about tennis. There is a pool to recline by and contemplate tennis. You can play padel and think about how you’d rather be playing tennis. You can walk on the rural roads outside the academy and wonder what Carlos Alcaraz considered as he covered the same path. It was probably tennis.

I love tennis enough to narrow my life like this. Others will definitely get bored, even if you go in a group. At JCF, you’re paying to LARP as a professional player/academy junior - not someone on holiday in a foreign country.

Logistics and miscellanea

Facilities and accommodations

The tennis courts are immaculate. They have 12 pristine clay courts³ and 11 hard courts. (When I arrived they had just finished resurfacing half the hard courts). They also have 1 synthetic grass court, 1 indoor court, and 8 padel courts. By default all sessions and additional private lessons will be on clay. I believe you can request hard courts if you’d like.

You’ll stay at the Hotel Rural, a collection of freestanding rooms that ring a garden of roses and olive trees. My room was recently renovated (or even built?) and included some nifty built-in closets. I roomed with my dad, and the space was easily large enough to fit two twin beds. I believe some units default to a queen. The two most fitting adjectives for the space were “tidy” and “spartan.”

You’ll have access to the gym. It’s a narrow rectangle in the middle of the tennis courts. It has stretching mats, free weights, squat racks, exercise bikes, yoga/medicine balls, a leg press, and four or five other machines I cannot name. Before the first session it’s empty, and I used it for stretching and warm-ups. During the rest of the day junior players will use it for conditioning, yoga, etc…, but it’s large enough to always find room.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are taken at the restaurant. Breakfast is continental, and features scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, croissants, smoked salmon, cheese, cereals, and bread. Lunch and dinner follow a script: you’re given two options for a starter, two for a main, and two for dessert. The starters may include vegetable soup, various kinds of salad (shrimp, chicken, tuna, goat cheese, etc…), or a Spanish omelette. Mains could be paella, chicken, salmon, whitefish, rice with eggs, breaded and fried pork/chicken, or a steak. Every table has a bottle of olive oil made from olives grown on the property.

The food was good, but not the highlight. I’m an American, which means I eat bad food on a daily basis. Given the base quality of European food is 50% above America’s, this was a big step up. However, you will not engage in fine dining. To be abundantly clear, I liked the food and I would gladly eat their Spanish omelettes and paella every day given the chance. I’m only emphasizing JCF is, first and foremost, a tennis academy, not a resort.

Transportation

JCF is 45 minutes from the Alicante airport by car. The academy can arrange a driver to pick you up, although the going rate is ~70 euros. I believe Ubers/rideshares are nonexistant in the area. I don’t know the rates for local taxis.

Miscellanea

• I attended JCF with a group of 14. All of us either played club or varsity in college. Every day I was part of a small (3-4) group of players assigned to a coach. We’d mix up groups and coaches nearly every day so I was exposed to a range of people.
• This may go without saying, but having a little Spanish definitely helps. Almost everyone speaks some english, but my public-school Spanish let me communicate more effectively multiple times.
• There are two dogs at the academy. Both are very friendly. One is small, independent-minded, and named Lima. She likes to nap in the restaurant and will lick people within range. The other is an old German Shepherd that shuffles around the academy between naps.
  • A favorite memory is of the German Shepherd sleeping in the middle of the main academy road one morning. Traffic had to find its way around it until someone led the dog away.
• Stringing is cheap and fast. Labor is 7 euros, and the turnaround time is, I was told, ~4 business hours. They only stock Babolat string, so bring your own.
• Juan Carlos Ferrero lives at the academy. I saw him walking around the grounds and drinking an espresso.
• The Hotel Rural offers laundry service. We left our laundry in a special plastic bag for the housekeepers, and the same day it was returned washed and folded. The price was 1 euro per kilo.
  • Guests can also do their own laundry with coin-operated machines.
• As mentioned before, JCF is a working tennis academy with a large junior population. This means you will be outnumbered by middle and high schoolers.
• The academy serves as a local gathering place/padel club. The restaurant sometimes hosts large gatherings (think a family of >14), and locals will play padel well into the evening.
• A joy of the academy is watching the juniors practice. Since there are two morning sessions and two afternoon sessions, you will always be off when another session is on and you can watch. Watching a great junior get a private lesson is ~60% as good as getting one yourself.
  • I, personally, am happy watching any level of tennis from middle-school tournaments to 60+ matches. The juniors at JCF are, for the most part, really good, and there are a few that are breathtakingly good. It’s a treat to watch them practice.
• The coaches are fantastic. They come from all over and are uniformly excited to be working at JCF. As with everything though, communication is important. Some coaches will have framings that stick. Others will not, even though they’re basically saying the same thing.
• My dad used the physio services and raved about it. He said there’s a big difference between a tennis-specific physio and the “general” ones he sees back home.
• I got private lessons from a guy named Pablo from Argentina. Apparently he used to work at Bolleteri’s and helped spin up their old Italy campus. He was excellent and I’d recommend him to anybody.