Advantage Tennis Academy swings back into action

Temporarily closing the Advantage Tennis Academy in mid-March wasn’t really ideal, but Jimmy Johnson didn’t have a choice.

Advantage’s home base of the Racquet Club of Irvine shut its doors when the novel coronavirus hit.

Johnson, who founded Advantage in 2003, just hoped to get his young athletes back on the court soon.

“Tennis kids just have got to hit a tennis ball,” he said. “They go crazy [when they don’t].”

When RCI reopened its 28-court facility in early May, so did Advantage — gradually. The program instituted a deal.

For $1,000, kids could come out and hit every day for four weeks, Advantage co-owner and tennis director Adrian Games said.

“It’s kind of like that song, ‘SexyBack,’ but we were doing the ‘Tennis Back’ version of it,” Games said. “That was our campaign.”

Games said for multiple weeks, coaches would send three kids to a court for “two-on-one” drills.

“That is great for the kids,” Games said. “It’s great for change of direction and consistency, and it just reminds you, the old grassroots, two-on-ones, how important they are. We’ve reinjected that into every program we can.”

As Orange County started reopening again, so has Advantage. The program’s summer camps began last week, and Games said the academy’s top-tier program will be training at the Tennis Club Newport Beach. Advantage’s preparatory program will stay at RCI.

Games, whose oldest daughter Leyden is a USC commit for women’s tennis, has his younger daughters, Biella, 14, and Ade, 12, also enrolled at Advantage. Practice time is crucial, especially with junior tennis tournaments still mostly off-court. The United States Tennis Assn. Junior Sectionals, typically played in June, have been rescheduled to begin July 25.

COVID-19 has negatively affected Advantage’s international clientele who come to Orange County, though co-owner and director Mahmoud Karim is currently in his native Egypt launching ATA Egypt. Still, local players are happy to be back on court.

Perry Di Giulio hits a forehand during practice at the Advantage Tennis Academy, which reopened at the Racquet Club of Irvine recently.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

Jett Middleton, originally from Colorado, has been living in Newport Beach for the last four years. He is committed to play at the University of Arizona and attends Advantage full time. His Universal Tennis Rating, which has reached more than 12, makes him an elite junior player.

Middleton is coached by Johnson.

“The time that COVID took away from me actually really helped me,” Middleton said. “Tennis is a really hard sport mentally, so you need rest. You get a lot of anxiety and worry that comes from tennis, so it was a good time to focus on my mental health and work hard on my fitness, kind of clean some details up. The few amount of times I was able to get on the court, I was able to work on details that I wouldn’t normally be able to work on because of tournaments.”

Advantage has meant a lot to the Di Giulio family, as brothers Joseph, Austin and now Perry have come through the program. Joseph went on to play for four years at UCLA and Austin now plays for Loyola Marymount, where his sophomore year of men’s tennis got wiped out by the coronavirus this spring.

As for Perry, he attended Advantage full time this school year. That might change in the fall, when he’ll be a high school freshman. Austin, who went to Advantage full time in high school, said he is pushing his younger brother to enroll at Corona del Mar High School.

“Looking back on it, I would have loved to play at least a year of high school tennis,” Austin Di Giulio said. “It’s really cool to get that team atmosphere before you go off to college. He loves tennis a lot, so that’s good.

“I’ve trained here pretty much every day my entire life, before college. One of the cooler things in my eyes about Advantage is just all of the relationships I’ve been able to make with people from all around the world. I have really good friends from Egypt, France, just people you’d never be able to meet at a normal high school. I thought that was pretty cool, how I was able to kind of see all of these different cultures without leaving my backyard.”

Owner Adrian Games, left, and co-owner Jimmy Johnson at the Advantage Tennis Academy.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

Not everyone has been attending Advantage full time since it reopened. Newport Coast residents Jazmine Aftabi, 14, and Lillia Edalat, 13, said they each attend a few times a week. Aftabi and Edalat, who will be incoming freshmen at Sage Hill School and Corona del Mar High this fall, hope to improve before entering high school tennis.

“We come as often as we can,” Aftabi said.

The program is gearing back up again for summer, which is good news for local tennis players. Jagger Leach, 13, is a Laguna Beach resident and the son of former women’s tennis star Lindsay Davenport. He’s another top local player who sometimes trains at Advantage.

“We just want to create pathways for all of these kids,” Adrian Games said. “They have a common mission, a common goal. They all talk about wanting to go pro, but let’s be honest. The big thing we try to help these kids with is getting them into college, having a pathway to college and developing a tennis game in an atmosphere that’s safe, challenging and pushes them.”

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