Carlos Alcaraz has a superbly strong bond with his coach, Juan Carlos Ferrero, but that partnership almost never happened.
Alcaraz has been working with Ferrero for many years, and their bond is really strong. The young Spaniard often talks about how much his coach means to him, admitting to considering him as a second father.
That’s a strong claim, but it also makes sense as he’s been working with it for a very long time, ever since his childhood. He grew up on the tennis court with Ferrero, but the story of how it came to be doesn’t get mentioned often.
His long-time agent, Albert Molina, talked about it in a recent interview with El Partidazo de COPE, admitting that he had doubts about connecting the two.
“I had been telling him for a long time that I had a 14-year-old boy who I saw different things about. And we talked about how to introduce Carlos [Alcaraz] to the academy punctually because he was a plus in terms of training, technicians. At that time, [Juan Carlos] Ferrero was training [Alexander] Zverev and I couldn’t push him much either.”
Ferrero used to work with Alexander Zverev when a very young Alcaraz was searching for a coach. That parallel is quite interesting, considering that they just played in the Roland Garros final, which Alcaraz ended up winning.
However, the Spaniard was just a young teenager back when Ferrero was appointed as his coach, while the German player was the world no. 3 on the ATP Tour.
“Taking advantage of the fact that over time they ended the relationship, that’s when we sat down with Ferrero and [Antonio] Cascales and the proposal came out. I had my doubts because he had come from training Zverev, who was 3rd in the ranking.”
Ferrero opted to work with Alcaraz and that shows how much he believed in him, and he was right.