Ashwin Vijayaragavan

Ashwin came to tennis at eleven, after his family moved from Doha back to India. Cricket was the obvious choice, as it is for most kids there, and that was the path he was on until he watched his brother play and decided he wanted to try tennis instead.

His first coach was Ilyas Ghouse, a former Indian national player, who pushed him hard from the beginning. It worked. By fourteen, Ashwin was ranked inside India's top five for his age group. By sixteen, he was playing the ITF junior circuit under coach Ganesh Raman, including the 2007 Australian Open Juniors.

A scholarship took him to the University of Texas, where he studied finance alongside a full college tennis schedule. He rose into the top 50 of the NCAA and was named Conference Player of the Year before turning professional at twenty-one.

He is straightforward about what those years gave him. College tennis taught him independence at least as much as it taught him tennis.

The call-up to the Indian Davis Cup squad came in 2013. After years on the individual circuit - where a player travels alone and wins or loses alone - team tennis was a sharp contrast, and remains the part of his playing career he talks about most.

Injury, combined with the grind of the ITF tour, eventually turned him toward coaching. The academy is built around what that journey actually required; not a theory about how players improve, but the standards, habits and competition that helped him reach the highest levels of the game.

Ashwin has even competed in the Australian Open 1 Point Slam qualifying event on Rod Laver Arena, the court every Australian junior grows up watching.

For him, it represents more than a career milestone. It is a reminder of where the game can take you.

That is the philosophy behind the squads at Adelaide Rising Stars. Set the standard high, give players the chance to experience it, and let them decide how far they want to go.