Growing up as the youngest of six kids came with its own unique competitive hierarchy—and for Ray Collins, being fourth-ranked at tennis within her own family was a humbling reality check, even after dominating her high school team and holding a respectable ranking in college. Fast forward decades, and Collins recently returned to a place that’s become her personal tennis reset button: the IMG Academy Adult Tennis Camp in Bradenton.
This isn’t just any coaching facility. The 600-acre campus was born from the vision of Nick Bollettieri, the late legendary tennis coach who purchased a 40-acre tomato field in 1978 and transformed it into one of tennis’s most storied institutions. When IMG Academy acquired the operation in 1987, they inherited a pedigree that includes ten former world number one players—from Andre Agassi to Serena Williams. Walking onto those grounds means standing where tennis history was literally built.
Collins and her wife, Erin, checked into the five-floor Legacy Hotel and settled into a routine of clinics, meals, and instruction with six fellow tennis enthusiasts—an ER doctor from Texas, a PhD engineering professor from Virginia, and a money manager from Manhattan. The variety of professionals bonding over backhands and serves points to something the adult camp captures beautifully: tennis transcends geography and career status when the love of the game brings people together. Instructors Roger and Jonathan, who’ve worked as a team for over two decades, coached them with a surgeon’s precision, diagnosing lazy forehands and faulty serves with the kind of insight that comes from years of reading technique.
The lessons stuck. Dipping the racquet head below the ball, tossing with a straight arm “like it is in a cast,” twisting the entire body for power—these weren’t just drills, they were recalibrations. The experience deepened when Jimmy Arias, IMG Academy’s director of player development and a former world number five, visited the class. Arias is credited with revolutionizing the modern forehand, and seeing those principles demonstrated firsthand by someone who literally changed the sport was the kind of moment that justifies flying across the country for tennis camp as an adult.
Thirty-two years after her first visit to IMG Academy, Collins is already planning her return. That’s not the behavior of someone checking a bucket list—it’s the devotion of someone who understands that getting better at what you love, surrounded by people who share that passion, is worth the investment every single time.
