Before 10:00 — arrival
Players on the morning track arrive at the academy ahead of a 10:00 start — dropped off by a parent, driven from a host family's home in Davie, or, for the online-school students, closing a laptop on the morning's first coursework. Bags down, courts assigned, and the day begins at an hour a conventional school would still have them in second period. That is the entire premise of the full-time program: prime training hours happen during the school day, so school is rebuilt around them rather than the reverse.
10:00–12:00 — warm-up and small-group work
The first block is warm-up followed by small-group, individualized drilling and point play. Small group here means something specific: a maximum 4:1 player-to-coach ratio, so the coach running the court knows exactly what each of the four players on it is working on. This is not four kids feeding balls in rotation — it is game-style training built around each player's development plan: shot selection and pattern development, strategy and tactics, movement and positioning, with live point play to pressure-test all of it. Video analysis is woven into regular training rather than sold as an add-on, so a pattern flaw gets seen, filmed, and corrected inside the same week. Sessions run on both surfaces the American junior calendar demands — hard courts and Har-Tru clay.
12:00–2:00 — the school block
The midday block is reserved for lunch and school. Players enrolled with the academy's accredited online partners — Laurel Springs and ICL Academy — do coursework here, with the rest landing in evenings and travel days. It is a real academic load on an unconventional clock; how that works, and how families keep grades college-eligible, is the subject of our guide to high school and tennis training in Florida. It is also two hours of genuine recovery in the middle of a training day — which matters as much to the tennis as to the transcript.
2:00–4:00 — on-court training and match play
The afternoon opens with the day's competitive block: on-court training and match play. Morning work was about building patterns; the afternoon is about using them against someone trying to take them away. Because full-time groups concentrate players of serious ambition, the practice partner across the net is part of the product — daily sets against comparable players do developmental work no drill can.
4:00–5:00 — physical training
The day closes with performance training and athletic conditioning — Athletix physical work scheduled into the program, not suggested as homework. Strength, movement, and athletic development get their own protected hour with the same seriousness as the forehand, because at every level above local tournaments, the body is the weapon. By 5:00 the morning-track player has put in a professional's working day: roughly five hours of court and physical work wrapped around two hours of school and recovery.
The afternoon-only track: 2:00–6:45
Not every full-time player does online school. The afternoon-only option exists for players at conventional local schools — including students at American Heritage Academy, who are accommodated with transportation between school and the academy. Their day: 2:00–4:00 small-group and individualized on-court training, a short break, 4:30–6:00 group training and match play, then 6:00–6:45 physical conditioning and athletic development. Same coaches, same method, same standards — compressed into the hours a school schedule leaves open, five days a week.
The week and the season around the day
No serious program runs the identical day fifty-two times a year. Training weeks carry the full volume above; tournament weeks bend around competition — travel, lighter preparation days, matches, and the coursework that online school lets a player carry on the road. Across the nine-month arc — an August–December semester and a January–May semester — the balance between building and competing shifts with the calendar. That rhythm is deliberate: development happens in the training blocks, and tournaments are where it gets measured, not where it gets made.
What separates a productive full-time year from an expensive one
Volume alone is the great trap of full-time training. Five hours a day of unfocused hitting produces a tired player, not a better one. Two things separate the productive year: an individual development plan — at Saviano, Nick Saviano designs every player's program personally, so each session serves a documented picture of where the player's game is going — and honest periodization, the discipline to schedule building, competing, and recovering as different kinds of weeks instead of running maximum intensity until something breaks. When you evaluate any academy, ask to see both: the plan for your child specifically, and a real calendar showing how a training week differs from a tournament week. A program that cannot show you either is selling hours.