Maria Sharapova, the No. 4 player, is the biggest example. She splits her time between LA and Florida, and hardly ever returns to Russia.

As for the facilities, Florida plays host to quite possibly the most popular tennis training academy in the world – the IMG Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy Although it is based stateside, it has produced many top stars from other nations.

The USTA is hard at work trying to reverse the player drought, but it may be years before we see the fruits of its labors. Like Nike said, they have even started creating “boot-camp” style camps for juniors.

In total, there are 10 players from the USA inside the top 100. But only three of those (Venus and Serena, Lindsay Davenport) have had success at Grand Slams and reached the No. 1 ranking.

Anyone else who has spent time overseas want to talk about tennis’ popularity? I know here in the USA, tennis falls behind baseball, football, basketball, and in some cities, even soccer.

Most of the juniors that I see in the US, for the girls they are so unfit and they don’t really have any weapons to compete against the European. The boys aren’t that special either. I think they are more concerned about finishing college than turn Pro. Most of the European players are from poor countries and households so they don’t have anything about tennis on their head.

The motivation for the US is more about finishing school, while the European is about going Pro and competing since school is really not that important for them it seems. Jankovic talks about how important school is for her, but I think deep down tennis is her life.