Transplanted Canadian super-coach Louis Cayer doing great things in the U.K.

NEW YORK – Respected tennis coach Louis Cayer left Canada for love.

But with so few homegrown, international-level coaches, and the best prospects being sent abroad in recent years to get the help they need to rise to the next level, these days Canada sure could  use the man they inducted into the Canadian Tennis Hall of Fame in 2013 as a builder.

The former head of the Nun’s Island tennis academy, Tennis Canada consultant and longtime Davis Cup captain, Cayer now works for the British Lawn Tennis Association where, in the vernacular of a complicated, management-heavy hierarchy, he is both “doubles leader” and head of high-performance coaching.

It all started a decade ago when Judy Murray, the mother and former coach of top player Andy Murray, was looking for a coach for elder son Jamie.

In Monte Carlo with Andy nearly a decade ago, she watched a two-hour coaching session Cayer had with top Israeli doubles players Jonathan Erlich and Andy Ram. “I thought, ‘Wow, that guy knows exactly what he’s doing,” Murray told Eh Game at the US Open.

Cayer had an opening during the grass-court season, and Murray committed to Cayer for six weeks – all she could afford at the time – attaching one of her Scottish coaches to soak up whatever knowledge he could. Jamie Murray was then paired up with another of Judy Murray’s kids from Scotland, Colin Fleming.

“He said he’d been living in London for three years, and I was the first person from the U.K. who’d asked – which was surprising when you have world-class talent on your doorstep,” she said.

Cayer, who by then was engaged to Brit Stella Crownshaw, was looking for a full-time role; Murray suggested to LTA chief Roger Draper that he consider taking him on. It turned into a hybrid job: a certain number of weeks with Jamie Murray, the rest in an ever-evolving job.

It is the first time in decades Cayer has been an employee, answering to a boss. But it was a small sacrifice to make.

Crownshaw had tried relocating to St-Sauveur, in the Laurentian mountains about an hour’s drive north of Montreal, to be with him. But her two children from a previous marriage weren’t as keen, both on the rural location and on Quebec’s language issues.

The only way for it to work was for him to make the move to London. “I didn’t want to leave. But at the age I was, I wanted to be with someone that I loved,” he said.

Cayer thought he would be running the LTA’s costly new national centre; instead, he was put in charge of visiting all the outlying clubs as a program manager. “I didn’t like that, because I couldn’t change anything by visiting four or five times a year,” Cayer said. So he went back to Draper, whose philosophy was to develop top-100 players. “Does that include doubles?” asked Cayer, noting there had been no top-100 players since 2000.

The answer was yes, and Draper asked him if he could produce two.

Cayer said he could do better than that.

Doubles wasn’t necessarily Cayer’s niche although the period he was coach, then captain of the Davis Cup squad in the 1990s was a glorious time for Canadian doubles with Daniel Nestor, Sébastien Lareau and Grant Connell all in the top 15 in the world rankings.

He produced a book and DVD on doubles for the International Tennis Federation in 2000, which added to his reputation as a guru.

He worked with a lot of singles players as well. But when Cayer joined the LTA, the organization was in its “all-star” phase with name coaches like Brad Gilbert, Paul Annacone, Peter Lundgren and Carl Maes being paid huge money.

So the doubles found him, in a sense. And stayed.

Murray reached the US Open men’s doubles final with Aussie John Peers, losing to the French team of Nicolas Mahut and Pierre-Hugues Herbert Saturday. They also reached the Wimbledon final, losing to Jean-Julien Rojer and Horia Tecau and won the Hamburg ATP tournament immediately afterwards.

It’s entirely likely the duo will make the final eight and participate in the ATP Tour Finals in London this November; Murray will be ranked in the top 10 for the first time in his career come Monday. Great Britain has four players ranked in the top 80 in doubles.

When he was in Montreal, Cayer was always an independent. He ran the academy at the Nun’s Island Tennis club and worked 50 to 100 days for Tennis Canada as a consultant in coaching certification. There were three or four months of conferences, and he travelled with players another four months.

He was respected by those at the higher levels. A relentless student of the game, scouter, video analyst, he’s scholarly in his approach. As a television commentator for the Rogers Cup for Radio-Canada for a number of years, his dry, technical delivery in a medium that has accustomed listeners to enthousiastic cheerleading took some getting used to. But if you listened, he taught you more than anyone else ever had.

But as the one in charge of the Coach 3 certification, which determined whether aspiring Canadian coaches could travel internationally, Cayer was not the most popular man in town.

The move to the U.K. has worked out better than he could have imagined.

It turned out Cayer under-promised on the top-100 players; there have been a dozen in singles and doubles combined since his arrival.

All the former all-stars on the LTA payroll are gone now, but although he has worked with some singles players including Johanna Konta, an Australian transplant who got to the fourth round at the US Open out of the qualifying ranks.

He also periodically still works with Murray, whose efforts in doubles have been a big part of Great Britain's place in the Davis Cup semi-finals; they meet Australia next weekend.

Working with more singles players is off the table, though; Cayer has moved on to a new phase of his life. After many years of trying, pushing 60, he and Stella became parents to son Sebastian, who has just turned three.

“I don’t want to travel eight or nine months now. I want to travel maybe three or four. So I told them I could develop their highest level of coaching certification, and had a vision of how that can be done,” Cayer said.

That’s Cayer’s real specialty, what he studied and what he lives and breathes – not coaching players, but coaching coaches.

He’s morphing the notion of a theoretical, textbook course into an interactive course that takes much longer, but that should turn out better coaches.

“There used to be a three-day session of me vomiting everything, and the retention was probably zero, the implementation and application probably zero. They had a lot of good information and knowledge that was probably very interesting, but not very useful,” Cayer said. “Now, they come in for a bit, implement it with their players, bring videotape of what they’ve done, come back, and ask me questions,” he said.

Judy Murray remains his biggest supporter – in fact, when Larry Jurovich (who coaches Canadian Sharon Fichman) had to beg off best man duty at Cayer’s wedding because of a work commitment, Cayer asked her to step in.

“No, I didn’t wear a tuxedo. I wore a dress, which I don’t do very often,” Murray recalled, laughing.