Holding Court with… Jose Higueras

“Life is good,” Jose Higueras says, sounding hale and hearty, from his home in Palm Springs.

Granted, the desert in those parts is getting hotter by the day. The temperature reached 100 for the first time earlier this month, and it’s only going higher from there. Which means Higueras, 70 and mostly retired, is heading north to his place in Idaho for the summer. A highly respected tennis lifer who played for his native Spain for 16 years and coached in his adopted United States for even longer, Higueras now spends his time roping horses, enjoying the great outdoors, and spending time with his “brand new” granddaughter.

“I’m a frustrated cowboy,” he says with a laugh.

Still, he sounds no less passionate about tennis than ever. Like most fans, Higueras tunes in to see his young countryman Carlos Alcaraz tear up the competition as often as he can. Higueras was born in Diezma, Spain, a three-hour drive west from Alcaraz’s home region of Murcia.

“I think he’s a monster,” Higueras says of Alcaraz, in the kindest way possible. “He elevates tennis with the way he plays, and how positive and enthusiastic he is. Tennis is going to benefit from him.”

My goal was always the same: The player has to get better. Jose Higueras

There’s no question that the U.S. game has benefitted from Higueras’ presence in this country for the last 40 years. He moved to the States in the early 1980s, and married Donna Bogert, the daughter of future Palm Springs mayor Frank Bogert.

“I liked how independent and positive Americans were,” says Higueras, who was accustomed to a “pretty ruthless” sporting press in Spain. “When I would lose and walk off court here, people would call out, ‘Great match, Jose!’ I thought, ‘These people are crazy!’”

Like so many other accomplished coaches, Higueras wasn’t the most gifted player. He had to study the game’s patterns and suss out his opponent’s weaknesses to survive. One reporter in the ’70s described his serve as “downright unathletic,” but conceded that his “steadiness and accuracy are uncanny.”

Higueras says his greatest playing memories came in Davis Cup for Spain.

“Every time I represented my country was something special,” he says.

His most satisfying win? A 6-2, 6-2, 6-2 dismantling of Jimmy Connors in the quarterfinals at Roland Garros in 1982.

“That was a good feeling,” Higueras recalls. “He was a better player than me, but my game matched up well with his.”

Higueras was also briefly famous for a match that he refused to keep playing. Facing Adriano Panatta in front of the Italian’s maniacal fans in Rome in 1978, Higueras was booed, jeered—and finally drilled in the leg with a flying coin. The normally sunny Spaniard responded with a choice gesture or two back at the crowd, and finally stalked off the court.

“I had to quit or else I would have killed somebody!” he said.

After his retirement in 1986, Higueras enjoyed a string of successes as a coach—with Americans Michael Chang, Jim Courier, and Todd Martin, and, in 2008, with Roger Federer. The Swiss hired Higueras during that year’s clay swing to help him try to win his first title at Roland Garros. Rafael Nadal threw a wrench into that plan, but Higueras and Federer stuck together long enough to win another major, the US Open, later that season.

Asked for a memory of his time with Federer, Higueras says, “I was always amazed by how well he treated people behind the scenes, at the hotel, in the car,” he says. “It’s easy to be nice when people are watching, but he was like that when no one else was around.”

As his time with Federer came to a close, another major, and ultimately more daunting, opportunity presented itself. In the fall of 2008, Higueras was hired by Patrick McEnroe to head up the USTA’s elite player development program.

At the time, the U.S. had four Top 10 players: Venus Williams, Serena Williams, Andy Roddick and James Blake. But the falloff was steep after that. There were just seven Americans in the men’s Top 100, and four in the women’s.

Traditionally, the USTA hadn’t been as deeply involved in player development as other countries’ federations. Which meant Higueras was tasked with creating a pipeline to the pros for a country of more than 300 million, essentially from scratch.

“There weren’t any parameters for what made a good program,” Higueras says. “No continuity or culture. We built a coaching philosophy and took it to all of the [USTA’s] sections.”

Under Higueras, Player Development trained thousands of coaches and started regional camps across the country. The goal was to build as wide a base of talent as possible and funnel the best kids up the pyramid. The system was both centralized and de-centralized: The USTA erected a $100 million, 100-court campus near Orlando, Fla., while at the same time partnering with the private coaches of junior players and giving them the freedom to train where they wanted.

Higueras, who grew up in a stone cabin with no electricity, tried to instill an ethos of hard work at all levels. He used his background as a clay-courter to teach U.S. players, who are historically known as towering power servers, a more patient, tactical, physical game. As far as dedication to the cause went, he tried to lead by example.

“I did two million miles on airplanes,” Higueras says. “When we got to a club, people said, ‘Coach, I can’t believe you guys are here.’”

Higueras knew the job was a decade-long project, and it took six years for results to show. In 2015, Tommy Paul, Reilly Opelka and Taylor Fritz swept the boys’ titles at Roland Garros, Wimbledon and the US Open. In 2017, Sloane Stephens and Madison Keys played in the US Open final, while Coco Gauff was the girls’ runner-up. By 2020, the U.S. had 30 players in the ATP and WTA Top 100, double the number of the No. 2 nation, Russia, and three times as many as the U.S. had 10 years earlier. Gauff, Fritz, Tiafoe, Paul, Opelka and Jessica Pegula have all cracked the Top 20 or better.

“Our concern was to give the players what they need,” Higueras said. “My goal was always the same: The player has to get better.”

Now Higueras hopes that legacy isn’t in jeopardy. In 2020, the USTA folded Player Development into its broader community tennis program and cut 110 jobs across the organization. Higueras left soon after. He worries that, with fewer coaches and camps to engage with kids, the net that the USTA casts won’t be nearly as wide, and that fewer U.S. players will be sent up the pro-tour pipeline.

“Good things are going to be taken away,” he says. “The U.S. should be fine for five or six years, but a country like this should never have to worry about having top tennis players.”

Higueras is quick to say that his concerns aren’t about having stars for their own sake. He thinks name players drive the recreational game, and can provide an appealing image for tennis in the U.S.

“You see what Serena and Venus [Williams] did, and now you have Coco [Gauff], who has this really nice personality, who is relevant to young people,” he says.

Should we spend a certain amount of money to try to get a player from the Top 75 into the Top 10, or should we use it to introduce tennis into more schools? That’s a conversation most federations have. Craig Morris, USTA chief executive for community tennis

Craig Morris, chief executive for community tennis at the USTA, acknowledges the success that Player Development has had, and says the program “should be commended” for “over-indexing” when it comes to Top 100 players. He also acknowledges that the Williams sisters “certainly impacted growth in many segments of the game.”

But Morris also says there’s not much research to suggest that top-player achievement always correlates with grass-roots growth.

“Sometimes they do, absolutely, but sometimes they may not,” he says.

Morris points to the commitments the USTA has made to its Pro Circuit events, junior tournaments like the Easter Bowl, and college tennis as examples of elite player development. He says that trying to maximize participation at all levels is a constant decision-making process about where to allocate funds, which aren’t unlimited, even for the USTA.

“Should we spend a certain amount of money to try to get a player from the Top 75 into the Top 10, or should we use it to introduce tennis into more schools?” Morris says. “That’s a conversation most federations have.”

For Higueras, the best answer to these questions remains the Player Development program he helped build.

“I’m not talking about just good players,” he says. “PD is a lot more than just Orlando. The camps were a huge value to the country, as a way to grow the game. When I say ‘player development,’ I mean developing players at every age and level.”

Higueras has put in the time and the miles to make that happen in his adopted country. Life is good, he says, with his horses and his homes out west. But he can’t stay away from the court entirely. This month he traveled to Barcelona to help run a clinic with coaches from Australia.

Wherever they come from, Higueras still wants the players to get better.