Fifteen minutes, and no highway required
Saviano High Performance Tennis trains at 5850 South Pine Island Road in Davie, immediately north of the Pines Boulevard corridor. From most of Pembroke Pines it is University Drive, Flamingo Road or Dykes Road north to Griffin Road and across — 10 to 20 minutes, depending on which end of the city you start from, with no expressway in the picture unless you want one. From Miramar the same routes work with a few minutes added, and I-75 is there for anyone west of Flamingo. This is a school run, not a commute, which is precisely why five afternoons a week is realistic here in a way it is not from Aventura or Doral.
The local tennis picture
Pembroke Pines and Miramar are large, young, family-dense suburbs with unusually well-organized municipal recreation — public courts, city junior programs, leagues and clinics that put a lot of children into the game every year. If your child is learning, or plays because it is fun, that infrastructure is the right answer and it is five minutes away. What southwest Broward does not have much of is the tier above: low-ratio, individualized, tournament-oriented training with physical development scheduled alongside the tennis. That tier concentrated in Davie, one town north, and for a Pines family the practical distance between the two rungs is about a quarter of an hour.
What full-time training normally costs a family
It is worth being explicit about what other families give up, because it is the part of the decision that gets glossed over in brochures. A committed junior whose family lives outside South Florida generally faces one of three arrangements: relocate the household, which means a parent's job, the other children's schools and the family's whole life reorganized around one child's sport; place the player with a host family and see them on holidays; or send them to a boarding campus, where a fourteen-year-old lives institutionally at exactly the age when they most need the people who know them. Every one of those is a real cost, and plenty of families conclude the sport is not worth it — reasonably.
From Pembroke Pines or Miramar, none of it applies. Saviano is a day academy with no dormitories, and a local full-time player trains all day and then goes home for dinner with their own family, sleeps in their own bed, keeps their friends, keeps their siblings' lives intact, and keeps the parent relationship that a teenage athlete under real pressure quietly depends on. That is not a small advantage. It is the largest one this location gives you.
What full-time actually looks like
The full-time program is for players committed to a collegiate or professional career, and it runs Monday to Friday on a nine-month calendar — August to December and January to May, with summer training June to August. There are two schedules: a morning program running 10:00 to 5:00 with a school and lunch block from 12 to 2, and an afternoon-only program running 2:00 to 6:45. Academics run through the academy's accredited education partners, Laurel Springs and ICL Academy, both built for athletes with flexible scheduling; students attending American Heritage are accommodated with transportation. The afternoon schedule is the one Broward families ask about most, because it can sit alongside a conventional school day — worth raising directly when you talk to the academy about your child's schooling.
The training itself runs at a maximum 4:1 player-to-coach ratio on lighted hard and Har-Tru clay courts, with physical training, video analysis and sports nutrition and performance psychology support built into the week rather than sold as extras. Nick Saviano designs each player's program personally and is typically on court daily. If you want the hour-by-hour version, we wrote one: a day in the life of a full-time tennis academy player. The physical setting — courts, gym, indoor track, turf area — is described on our Davie page.
Be honest about whether your child should do it
Proximity makes full-time possible; it does not make it correct. Most competitive juniors should not train full-time, and a program that tells you otherwise on a first phone call is selling. Two questions decide it. Is the player pulling — asking for more court time, choosing tennis over the other things a fifteen-year-old could be doing, and competing seriously rather than being entered? And does online school genuinely suit this student? Accredited flexible academics work extremely well for self-directed learners and poorly for students who need a classroom and a teacher standing over them; that is a judgment only the family can make honestly. If the answer to either is no, the right program is the after-school program — one to five afternoons a week, 2.25 hours per session, with the same coaches on the same courts — and it will still take your child a long way.
The decision you can afford to reverse
This is the last advantage of living fifteen minutes away, and it is underrated. A family that sells a house and moves three states to go full-time has made an irreversible bet on a fourteen-year-old. A Pembroke Pines family has made a schedule change. If full-time turns out to be the wrong fit — the wrong stage, the wrong academic model, or simply a child who wanted something else — you step back to after-school afternoons without having dismantled anything. Start with the Saviano Evaluation, a one-to-one assessment by Nick Saviano of where the player stands and what path is realistic; it is not a private lesson, and it exists so that both sides know what they are agreeing to. And before any of it, compare properly: our guide to the best tennis academies in Florida covers the field, including the boarding programs we are deliberately not.