Could he make a British Sharapova?

It is dawn in Bradenton, Florida, and sleepy-eyed groups of children are tumbling out of dormitories on a sun-baked landscape outside town. They begin to run, down the paths that weave between the trees, past the tennis courts, round the football pitches and golf driving range.

An hour later - still running - they head for a vast dining hall where they eat breakfast: waffles with syrup or toast. After this they will work until it starts to get dark, then most of them will head for the gym and lift weights, or perhaps take off on another run. By bedtime, the children are ready to collapse from exhaustion.

At Bradenton, the children are queuing to get in. This west Florida town is the home of the Nick Bollettieri Academy, the coaching establishment credited with creating many of the world's tennis champions, including Maria Sharapova, the sensation of Wimbledon.

At just 17, Sharapova is already the star of her own legend, a story in which Mr Bollettieri features prominently.

It was he who took her in when she arrived, almost penniless, with her father after scraping together the money to buy a ticket from Russia to the United States. Sharapova was seven years old, but Bollettieri and his people saw something that told them that she had the makings of, well, a legend.

Nick Bollettieri is one of the most powerful influences in the tennis world. Former Wimbledon champions Boris Becker, Pete Sampras, Steffi Graf, the Williams sisters, as well dozens of lesser players, such as Anna Kournikova, have graduated from his school.

Another was a skinny, 16-year-old boy who, in 1986, lost badly at his first big professional event in Washington. He had just signed a sponsorship deal and he felt he'd failed.

He took his racket to a nearby park and smashed it into pieces. He wanted to quit. Bollettieri told him: "There's no time clock on you. You have everything you need to become a star."

The boy was none other than Andre Agassi. The story is well known among Bollettieri alumni and is occasionally quoted when the question of determination and willpower is raised. Which, in the creed of Nick Bollettieri, is pretty well all the time.

At Bradenton, they practise and teach mind control. The children usually enrol at the age of eight and, from the start, their mental attitude is monitored. Video cameras are installed on every practice court and after a session, coaches from the Bollettieri mental conditioning unit go through the film with the players.

They study body language, facial expressions, demeanour and analyse everything. Anger is controlled, channelled into effort. Concentration - they call it "focus" - is king.

It might appear faintly spooky and alien to British observers who, perhaps, are used to rather more relaxed methods.

There may be a whiff of The Village of the Damned about this effort to control children's mental processes. But the tanned, fit youngsters who stroll around the 175-acre campus at Bollettieri's academy are certainly no glassy-eyed mutants.

"They are probably the happiest, best-adjusted kids you'll find anywhere," says Richard Macey, a former pupil. Macey, now aged 25, was taken to Bollettieriat the age of 14. He lived with his parents in Sutton Coldfield in Warwickshire and, at the age of 12, had already shown considerable promise as a schoolboy player.

"My parents bought me some coaching for a few hundred dollars. It was all we could afford then and the idea was it might help my game. But Nick's people seemed impressed.

"In those days, the annual fee was $25,000 and it was way out of reach, but fortunately they gave me an 80 per cent scholarship."

After an encouraging first year, Bollettieri waived all the fees and Macey began what was to be a 10-year stay in the US. One of his first memories was of a blonde child whacking tennis balls with astonishing strength and accuracy - a seven-year-old Maria Sharapova.

"Even then, you could see she was special," says Macey. "She was absolutely fantastic."

He graduated through the American school system at the academy and went on to play tennis on the college circuit. In 1999 Nick Bollettieri telephoned him.

"He said he wanted a hitting partner for Serena and Venus Williams," recalls Macey. "So I went with them to the Paris indoor tournament and I was with them for six months, through Wimbledon, a few tournaments in the States and Germany. I spent a lot of time working with Serena and it was one of the most exciting times of my life.

"She has incredible focus. Her mental strength is really amazing. But that is what Nick teaches. You get some people who can't take the regime. It's true, only the fittest survive. Those who can't make it are the ones who don't have the commitment or the will.

"Nick sets the pace himself. He is totally committed and a tremendous inspiration. You just have to stand near him to feel the man's charisma."

Macey started his own tennis academy at the Four Oaks club in Warwickshire in April, using many of the methods taught by Bollettieri. He has around 120 pupils who turn up for coaching at weekends, after school and during holidays. The sight of youngsters hitting balls to the pounding beat of high-volume rock music may be strange to British club tennis, but Macey believes what he learned from Bollettieri could raise standards here.

ONE leading sports commentator wrote, tongue in cheek, that if Bollettieri had his school in Falmouth, rather than Florida, it would have been closed down by now by "the agents of political correctness". Bollettieri, he wrote, would be defending himself against charges of child abuse and exploitation of minors.

It was a playful poke at the trend away from encouraging competitiveness and excellence in school sport, but is there an underlying element of truth here? Does Britain really want to go the Bollettieri route?

In the US, some sports commentators have criticised Bollettieri for being a dedicated self-publicist. Others have found his brash, slightly overwhelming manner daunting. He is 73 later this month and, according to his aides, still works out in the gym for an hour every day before breakfast.

He served as a paratrooper in the American army and dropped out of law school to start his academy on a former tomato farm in 1979. It has made him extremely rich. In 1987 he sold it to the IMG consortium and receives premium fees to continue coaching. He has five children, none of them by his current wife, Cindy.

His acknowledged success in creating champions means there is a waiting list to join the academy and only talented players need apply. It helps to be well-off, too. A child enrolled as a boarder will have to pay $39,600 a year. Day pupils pay $24,300.

Some detect an unappealing, even dangerous, side to "hothousing" children in the quest for sporting fame and riches. There is something about it that encourages obsessiveness in parents, it is argued. The Ince family, from Hove in Sussex, plunged themselves into debt to launch their daughter, Michaela, into top-class tennis.

Michael Ince, an amateur sports hero in his youth, earned a steady living as a glazier. His wife worked part-time in the NHS. Somehow, they raised and borrowed tens of thousands of pounds to send Michaela to the Bollettieri academy. The couple made five trips to Florida with Michaela before she was 11. The longest visit lasted three and a half months and, like the rest, was funded from raising loans on their home.

They slept in cheap motels or in a camper van in the academy car park. Michaela had one racket; one tennis outfit. She is 16 now, back in Britain and playing well as a junior, but the sort of success her parents dreamed of has so far eluded her.

Another British graduate of the Bollettieri academy is Miles Kasiri, an 18-yearold from Margate. He was 12 when his mother, a sports scientist, approached Nick Bollettieri at Wimbledon:

"I told him I didn't have any money, but he agreed to come and watch me play," says Miles. "He gave me a scholarship."

Miles, the son of orthopaedic surgeon Firuz Kasiri, who is of Iranian descent, spent four years at the academy. He did school courses with Maria Sharapova and submitted to the taxing regime of at least four hours of tennis every day, running, fitness training in the gym and "mental" - the mind conditioning that is so crucial to Bollettieri's methods.

Miles was the first Briton in 32 years to reach the junior final at Wimbledon. He was narrowly beaten by the French prodigy and world junior number one, Gael Monfils. Miles has been hailed as the next Tim Henman, an accolade some young tennis players might hesitate to accept.

But then, as a Bollettieri pupil, Miles has been thoroughly schooled in the "mental", which, intriguingly, comprises teachings on coping with losing.