What Evert is, fairly stated
Evert Tennis Academy sits in Boca Raton and was founded by the Evert family — a name that needs no explanation in this sport. It is a boarding boutique: a true boarding academy, but far smaller than the large multi-sport campuses, with academics delivered through a partnership with Grandview Preparatory School. For a family that specifically wants a residential program at a human scale, with a serious tennis pedigree behind it and school arranged, that combination is genuinely hard to beat and we would say so to anyone who asked.
Which is why the question worth asking is not whether Evert is good. It is whether the model fits your family.
First, name your reason
In our experience families come to this comparison carrying one of four reasons, and each points somewhere different.
- You do not want boarding. The player is thirteen, or the family is not ready to send a child to live away from home — a position that needs no defending.
- You want a smaller, coach-led environment. Not just a smaller campus, but a program where a named senior coach is on court with your child rather than overseeing a staff who are.
- You are not in Boca. Daily driving from Broward or Miami-Dade to Boca Raton in season is a real cost in hours, and hours are what a junior does not have.
- You want accredited online school, with the family staying together. Some families would rather relocate as a unit and run academics online than split the household.
If you want boarding at larger scale: IMG
Some families look at Evert and conclude they want boarding, just bigger. IMG Academy in Bradenton is the other end of that spectrum — the campus that grew out of Nick Bollettieri's 1978 academy, bought by IMG in 1987, now a full multi-sport boarding school with tennis as one program among many, its own school and dorms, and the NCSA recruiting network under the same roof.
The trade is the familiar one: unmatched scale and facilities, in exchange for being one of a great many, with the coach your child sees daily unlikely to be the name on the gate. It is also not South Florida — Bradenton is a different part of the state. If that is the direction you are heading, our guide to tennis boarding schools in Florida lists the residential options together.
If the need is technical: Rick Macci
Also in Boca Raton, and a completely different proposition. Rick Macci coached Venus and Serena Williams as juniors — the story told in King Richard — and a young Jennifer Capriati, and his coaching is private-lesson led and technically driven rather than a full residential ecosystem.
For a player who needs a stroke rebuilt by a master teacher, that focus is the point. For a family who wants school, housing, physical training and a tournament structure arranged around the tennis, it is a different kind of service and should not be compared to Evert on those terms.
If you want a coach-led day academy: the Davie model
This is our own model, disclosed. Saviano High Performance Tennis is a day academy in Davie, not a boarding school, and it is built around a small number of players training at a maximum 4:1 player-to-coach ratio on lighted hard and Har-Tru clay courts. Nick Saviano — nine years on the ATP Tour, fifteen years as a USTA Director of Coaching, author of Maximum Tennis — personally designs each player's program and is typically on court daily.
Because it is a day academy, housing is solved differently: families relocate to the area, or the player stays with one of a network of vetted private host families in Davie. School runs through accredited online partners — Laurel Springs or ICL Academy — which keeps academics flexible around training and travel, and local students at American Heritage Academy are accommodated with transportation. Every college-track player the academy has developed has earned a place on a university team, D1 through D3, with alumni at Yale, Harvard, Duke, Stanford and Columbia.
Location matters for this comparison: Davie is central to Broward, roughly fifteen minutes from Fort Lauderdale and twenty-five from Miami, which is the practical difference for a family in Miami-Dade weighing a daily drive to Boca Raton. If you are north of us, our Boca Raton page sets out what the trip looks like in the other direction.
Stay with Evert if
We would tell you to stop looking in three situations. If you want your child in a residential program and are clear-eyed about that — boarding is a legitimate developmental choice, not a compromise, and Evert does it at a scale most large campuses cannot. If you want school and tennis on one arrangement, with a partner preparatory school handling academics in person rather than online. And if you are local to Boca Raton and the logistics simply work, in which case you are choosing a strong program in your own town and every alternative on this page costs you drive time to solve a problem you do not have.
If you are genuinely undecided between models rather than between names, read boarding school vs day academy first — it is the decision that cuts the list in half. Then work through how to choose a tennis academy for the questions that separate programs once you have a shortlist, and see the wider field in our guide to the best tennis academies in Florida. Ask each academy directly about cost; the models differ significantly and none of them tells the whole story on a website.