Maria Sharapova

My hero is Maria Sharapova. She is now a top-ranked tennis player. She first started when she was just four years old and has loved tennis ever since. I first learned about her when I saw her playing on television. I thought that she had a great talent. However, what really caught my attention was her loud grunt whenever she would strike the ball.

Maria has devoted so much to tennis. When she first started to play national tournaments, she quickly moved to the top ten in only five months. She turned professional in 2001 when she was 14 years old and won Wimbledon in 2004 when she was only 17. Currently, her ranking is in the top five. She has worked incredibly hard to get up there. However, she had a lot of help from the tennis academy that she trained at which is the Nick Bollettieri Academy. This is one of the best tennis academies in the United States.

Maria now lives in Brandon, Florida and trains at the Nick Bollettieri Academy. This academy is also where Serena and Venus Williams and Andre Agassi played. Before she lived in Florida, she lived in Nyagan, Russia with her mother, Yelena, and her father, Yuri. Maria was born in Russia on April 19, 1987.

Right now, Maria is twenty two years old. When she was two, the Sharapova family fled from Belarus a year earlier to avoid radiation from Chernobyl. They settled in the town of Sochi, next to the Black Sea. They bounced around from place to place until Maria got an acceptance to the world famous Nick Bollettieri Academy. Yelena was forced to stay behind, so Maria had to stay with only her father.

Maria Sharapova is important to me because she is incredibly devoted to playing tennis, as am I. I plan to follow in her footsteps as I get older and play more and more. I think that she is a good inspiration to everyone who loves to play tennis competitively. She is my role-model because she has devoted her life to tennis. I am trying to be the best that I possibly can be in tennis, like she has done.