More About Coach Bill
Coach Bill brings to the courts over 40 years of competitive tennis playing experience and 30 years of tennis coaching experience at all levels of the game.
I first started playing tennis at the age of 10 when my dad began trading physics tutoring for tennis lessons with a high school tennis player that lived on our street named Rick Vargas. At first, I hated tennis but by the time I was 12 years old you couldn't drag me off the courts. It's all I wanted to do. It was life altering for me because before that point, in many ways, I was heading down the wrong the path. Tennis provided for me a safe and extremely positive environment to develop into a young man. I competed in USTA tournaments and attained a ranking of #25 in the Boys 18's singles and #1 in the Boys 18's doubles. I was fortunate enough to be competing at a time in which Southern California was a hotbed for tennis talent. During that time, I was competing against and training with future pros such as Michael Chang and Pete Sampras. They were better than me, but I could hang with them. When I was 16, I had the opportunity to live at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Florida for a Summer. As luck would have it, I roomed with a then unknown but up and coming teenager named Andre Agassi. My tennis journey as a player has been such an amazing adventure. It has helped me as an individual to learn how to go after a dream, face adversity, and to never and ever give up.
From player to coach...
After graduating from high school, I played for 3 different colleges, 2 of them on athletic scholarship, from Div 1 to NAIA: Long Beach State University, Cal Poly Pomona, and Azusa Pacific University, where I graduated with a Bachelor's degree in psychology. During college I supported myself by teaching tennis on the side. After graduation, family and friends were quick to point out that now I would need to go out and get what they considered to be a "real" job. I thought a lot about what I wanted in a career and life. I knew I wanted to help people and I also knew that in many ways tennis had saved my life. Most of my friends were people I met through tennis and most of my favorite memories also came through the sport of tennis.
After much thought I knew that I wanted to give back to the sport that have given me so much and at that time Tennis Anyone was born!
Star Students over the Years
Jack Li
#1 Boy's Singles 2003 Southern California
Jonathan Calienes
#2 Nationally Boys 14's Doubles
ATP Men's Professional Doubles ranking by the age of 16