Meet the ITF World Tennis Tour Player Panel: Francesco Vilardo

Last month, the ITF announced the players elected to the newly-created ITF World Tennis Tour Player Panel. The members will sit on the Panel until the end of the 2021 season and for two-year terms thereafter.

We spoke to all the players on both the men's tennis and women's tennis panels, to find out about their tennis careers to date and their hopes for what they can achieve during their time as panel members. On the men's tennis panel, we have already heard from Aldin Setkic and Niki Kaliyanda Poonacha.

This time it is the turn of Francesco Vilardo, a 30-year-old player from Italy. Vilardo has competed on the professional tour since 2005, and reached a career-high ATP singles ranking of No. 455 in October 2018. He has won two singles and seven doubles titles on the ITF Tour. Here's what he had to say...

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I started to play tennis when I was seven years old. My father was (and still is) an amateur tennis player, and I followed him when he was playing with his friends. My passion for the sport comes from there. Until I was 14 years old, I was playing two times a week after school… and for two other afternoons a week, like all Italian boys, I played football.

But at the age of 14, I decided that I wanted to play tennis for real and unfortunately I had to leave my family and my hometown to start training at certain level. I never played ITF junior tournaments and I grew up playing a lot of national tournaments in Italy until I reached a good national ranking. That soon permitted me to enter in qualifying at Futures-level tournaments. I won my first ATP point at a Futures event in Italy, after coming through qualifying, when I was 19. From this moment on, I started to travel more outside of the country.

Since then I have travelled all over the world playing a lot of Futures events, and also some ATP Challengers too. I reached my best ATP ranking, No. 455, in 2018 after winning two Futures tournaments, having previously broken the Top 500 a couple of years before. Right now, I’m ranked No. 769 and I’m 30 years old but I still want to try to improve my game and my ranking until that’s no longer possible.

I decided to run for the ITF World Tennis Tour Players Panel because I’ve always been interested in helping solve the problems that the players are facing on the tour. I have a lot of experience on the tour, and I know a lot of players, so I think I have a good profile to cover this role.

I really hope that my support will help the ITF to have a clearer idea of the tour from the perspective of the players. I want to bring the voice of the players to the table of the ITF and make sure it is heard. At the end of the day, this is why the panel has been created. The communication between tennis’ governing bodies and the players is very important. I am sure that the panel will lead to improvements in this area.