{"id":3708,"date":"2011-05-18T11:27:06","date_gmt":"2011-05-18T01:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/vic\/?p=3708"},"modified":"2011-05-18T11:27:06","modified_gmt":"2011-05-18T01:27:06","slug":"young-star-on-the-rise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/vic\/news\/2011\/05\/18\/young-star-on-the-rise","title":{"rendered":"Young star on the rise"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #888888\">By Liam Twomey<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Destanee Aiava is currently the best female tennis player for her age group in Australia and one day hopes to be the greatest in the world.<\/p>\n<p>She was encouraged by her parents to take up sport at an early age and quickly selected tennis.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u201cWe tried to get her involved with team sports but she didn\u2019t like the idea of sharing,\u201d said Mark Aiava, Destanee\u2019s father.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy wife and I comprised a list of sports for her to play and she woke up the next morning and said \u2018I want to be number one in the world in tennis\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Destanee achieved her best on-court performance at the recent Optus 12s National Claycourt Championships where she was able to win her first ever national title at just 10 years of age.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe second set was a little harder than the first and I made a few mistakes in the first two games,\u201d said Destanee after the final, which she won easily over Sasha Bollweg from Western Australia, 6-0 6-2, in just 57 minutes.<\/p>\n<p>Impressively, Aiava didn\u2019t drop a set for the entire tournament.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u201cShe had been highly ranked for some time and her goal was to win one before she was 11 and she managed to achieve that which was a big one for her,\u201d said Mark.<\/p>\n<p>Her style of game is similar to Serena Williams, who also happens to be her favourite player.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cShe is an all round aggressive player. She likes to attack the net.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Currently sitting at a career high ranking of No.348, 200 spots ahead of her nearest age group rival in Australia, Destanee is working on achieving some short and long term goals.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHer big goal is to be world champion and play at those big events. Her goal at the moment is to dominate everyone in her age group and that\u2019s not just Australia wide, that\u2019s worldwide.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Tennis Victoria\u2019s Talent Development Manager, Ashley Naumann, believes Destanee can have a lot of success.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDestanee has made significant progress with her development over this past year. She has a very bright future in front of her.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>See what Destanee had to say after winning the Optus 12s National Claycourt Championship.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Destanee Aiava: 2011 Optus 12s National Claycourt Champion\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Bgd--izOG0k?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Liam Twomey Destanee Aiava is currently the best female tennis player for her age group in Australia and one day hopes to be the greatest in the world. She was encouraged by her parents to take up sport at an early age and quickly selected tennis. \u00a0\u201cWe tried to get her involved with team [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5907,"featured_media":3712,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/vic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/vic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/vic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/vic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5907"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/vic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/vic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/vic\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/vic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/vic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/vic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}