After perusing the past champions list of the upcoming Eddie Herr International, I decided to cross reference those champions with their highest ATP career ranking. I think Emilio Sanchez said it best in a recent interview:
"Every kid who is playing wants to be a pro. The main problem is that the spots available are very, very few. Because in tennis you only have 100 top pros and these 100 pros don't change every year. So it's not like you have 100 chances every year to be a top 100 player because many of these guys can have careers lasting seven to 10 years and only a few guys slip or get injured or retire. So you may have five spots open up in the top 100 every year. Think about that for a minute. You're talking about maybe five spots for all the young players in the world, for all of the academies, for all of the federations all over the world."
Here are the results:
Boys 18 1993 - #1 Marcelo Rios CHI 1994 - #106 Frederico Browne ARG 1995 - #47 Michal Tabara CZE 1996 - #3 Ivan Ljubicic CRO 1997 - #19 Xavier Malisse BEL 1998 - #3 David Nalbandian ARG 1999 - #1 Andy Roddick USA 2000 - #440 Luciano Vitullo ARG 2001 - #156 Bruno Echagaray MEX 2002 - #243 Florin Mergea ROM 2003 - #222 Scoville Jenkins USA 2004 - #187 Jeremy Chardy FRA 2005 - #71 Marin Cilic CRO 2006 - #705 Nicolas Santos BRA
Boys 16 1993 - #236 Stefano Cobolli ITA 1994 - #381 Ivan Rodrigo ESP 1995 - #216 Florian Allgauer ITA 1996 - #42 Irakli Labadze GEO 1997 - #244 Catalan Gard ROM 1998 - #45 Nicholas Mahut FRA 1999 - #557 Julien Maigret FRA 2000 - #166 Lamine Ouahab ALG 2001 - #1174 Alexander Skrypko BLR 2002 - #928 Gregory Ouellette USA 2003 - #192 Jesse Levine USA 2004 - #1364 Kellen Damico USA 2005 - #1377 Gonzalo Escobar ECU 2006 - #1461 Grigor Dimitrov BUL
Boys 14 1993 - #326 Kobi Ziv ISR 1994 - #92 Federico Luzzi ITA 1995 - #469 Simon Dickson GBR 1996 - #3 Guillermo Coria ARG 1997 - #203 Stephani Bohli SUI 1998 - #1024 Ivan Stelko CRO 1999 - #307 Jorge Aguilar CHI 2000 - #208 Brendan Evans USA 2001 - #1400 Clancy Shields USA 2002 - #334 Pavel Chekhov RUS 2003 - #859 Daniel Lopez PAR 2004 - Ricardis Borankis LTU 2005 - Grigor Dimitrov USA 2006 - Yasutaka Uchiyama JPN
Boys 12 2000 - #1234 Nicolas Terrera ARG 2001 - Jean Marc Bazanne HAI 2002 - Maksim Tikhomirov USA 2003 - Lasu Kukhalashvili GEO 2004 - Bernard Tomic AUS 2005 - Emmett Egger USA 2006 - Mitchell Krueger USA
Girls 18 1993 - #20 Tatiana Panova RUS 1994 - #8 Anna Kournikova RUS 1995 - #91 Eugenia Kulikovskaya RUS 1996 - #370 Andrea Sebova SVK 1997 - Zsofia Gubasci HUN 1998 - #27 Virginie Razzano FRA 1999 - #44 Aniko Kapros HUN 2000 - #71 Edina Gallovits ROM 2001 - #3 Jelena Jankovic SRB 2002 - #4 Ana Ivanovic SRB 2003 - #39 Kateryna Bondarenko UKR 2004 - #167 Monica Niculescu ROM 2005 - #47 Dominika Cibulkova SVK 2006 - #248 Urszula Radwanska POL
Girls 16 1993 - Alice Cenepa ITA 1994 - #91 Eugenia Kulikovskaya RUS 1995 - #725 Alina Tecsor ROM 1996 - Mira Radu ROM 1997 - #62 Stephanie Foretz FRA 1998 - #435 Chloe Carlotti FRA 1999 - #61 Stephanie Cohen-Aloro FRA 2000 - #1 Maria Sharapova RUS 2001 - #299 Ko Bier CAN 2002 - #150 Alisa Kleybanova RUS 2003 - #248 Mihaela Buzarnescu ROM 2004 - #216 Madison Brengle USA 2005 - #308 Michelle Larcher de Brito POR 2006 - Tanya Raykova BUL
Girls 14 1993 - #8 Anna Kournikova RUS 1994 - Jessica Lehnhoff USA 1995 - #178 Ekaterina Sysoeva RUS 1996 - #210 Mia Buric GER 1997 - #88 Maria Salerni ARG 1998 - #808 Katrina Bandere LAT 1999 - #55 Barbora Strycova CZE 2000 - #219 Katia Afinogenova RUS 2001 - #519 Estefania Balda ECU 2002 - #310 Liu Wanting CHN 2003 - #106 Sorana Cirstea ROM 2004 - Maria Hokh RUS 2005 - #611 Tamaryn Hendler BEL 2006 - Hanna Orlik BLR
Girls 12 2000 - #150 Alisa Kleybanova RUS 2001 - #310 Lui Wanting CHN 2002 - #371 Sharon Fichman CAN 2003 - #464 Gail Brodsky USA 2004 - #829 Tara Moore GBR 2005 - Hanna Orlik BLR 2006 - Laura Robson GBR
It has a few minor errors, though. The Eddie Herr site has loads of typos and the author of this article didn't double check the names. Ricardas Berankis is listed as 'Borankis' and Maria Mokh as 'Hokh', so it's no wonder that the author thought them to have no rankings when he/she searched the ATP or WTA sites.
For the record, Berankis's ranking is a shockingly impressive 698 where as Mokh has a career high of 405.
Seems to be the winners of the under 18's go on to be most successful and junior success seems to mean more in the womens game.
In the past few years we've had a few girls who've done well under 12, i just hope they can keep up the success as they move up.
From having seen Tara play, you can see shes very talented but she needs a lot of work, shes still pretty raw.
Laura Robsons early junior success suggests shes a good prospect but i haven't seen her play so can't really judge.
When i saw both Ren sistes i wasn't overly impressed but Jennifer was clearly having a bad match, Jess was only 12 and just didn't have enough firepower.