148.Tennis Teacher

Oscar Wegner is one of the most known tennis coaches in the world. After playing internationally in the 1960s, Oscar undertook a coaching career and developed a remarkable methodology that makes tennis an easy sport to learn. Tennis, Oscar says, is far simpler than it looks.Oscar's coaching concepts have had tremendous impact globally, earning him, from Brad Holbrook, host/producer of the Tennis Television Show in the USA, the designation of "the father of modern tennis". Oscar Wegner's breakthrough techniques, which he initially taught in the National Tennis School in Spain, then in Florianopolis, Brazil, where Oscar coached a group of young players that included "Guga" Kuerten until he was 14, later on TV in the USA, and finally broadcast worldwide through ESPN International, have produced top players in the USA and in countries as far as Russia, Thailand, South America, Spain, and the Far East. Among those are the famous Williams sisters, whose father Richard learned from Oscar's televised lessons the techniques that put them on short notice on top of the tennis world, and Paradorn Srichaphan, whose father coached him aided by Oscar's videos.

After a wonderfully productive decade on television, first with the Tennis Television Show on the USA's Prime Network (now Fox Sports), and then on ESPN International and the Pan American Sports Network as a tennis commentator for their Latin Americam shows, including Wimbledon, the French Open and the Australian Open, Oscar switched career gears and decided to tackle changing the coaching of the game at its grass roots level. He is presently based in Clearwater, Florida, working on a massive campaign to reform the American conventional tennis teaching system and to take tennis and its popularity in the USA to a brand new level.

A native of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Wegner traded his engineering studies for a far more exciting career in tennis. From 1963 to 1967 he played the International Tennis Circuit in the United States, Europe, South America, Africa and the Caribbean. While playing and practicing with many of the top players of the 50's and 60's and some who would become the top players in the 70's, i.e. Roy Emerson, John Newcombe, Tony Roche and Manuel Santana, he compared notes with them and began his search into the secrets of their success.

A dedicated world traveler, he has served as teaching pro and tennis director for confederations, cities, clubs, academies, schools and camps in many countries.Wegner launched his coaching career in 1968, first as an assistant to the incomparable Pancho Segura at the famous Beverly Hills Tennis Club in California, a job that included daily exchanges with former World Champion Pancho Gonzalez. It was there that he made the crucial observation that tennis was being taught one way while the pros played in an entirely different way.

Wegner set out to resolve this discrepancy. His research led him to isolate the actual basis of tennis that apply to any player at any level, whether a pro, an intermediate player, or a beginner. He developed, as well, a teaching methodology to communicate those basics to players and coaches alike. This approach, from its inception, has produced remarkable results, not only in Wegner's hands, but by other coaches as well.