Serena Williams
Early life

Williams was born on September 26, 1981, in Saginaw, Michigan, to Oracene Price and Richard Williams. She is the youngest of Price's five daughters, after half-sisters Yetunde, Lyndrea, and Isha Price, and full older sister Venus. She also has at least seven paternal half-siblings. When the children were young, the family moved to Compton, California, where she started playing tennis at the age of four. Her father home-schooled her and Venus. While he and her mother have been her official coaches, her other mentors have included Richard Williams, a Compton man who shared her father's name and subsequently founded The Venus and Serena Williams Tennis Tutorial Academy.

When Williams was nine, she and her family moved from Compton to West Palm Beach, Florida so she could attend the tennis academy of Rick Macci, who provided her with additional coaching. Macci did not always agree with Williams's father, but respected that "he treated his daughters like kids, allowed them to be little girls". By 1991, Williams had a 46–3 record on the United States Tennis Association junior tour and was ranked No. 1 among under-10 players in Florida. When Williams was 10, Richard stopped sending his daughters to national junior tennis tournaments, as he wanted them to "go slowly" and focus on school, and because he wanted to ensure they would not burn out before turning professional. Experiences of racism also influenced this decision, as he had heard white parents talk about the Williams sisters in a derogatory manner during tournaments. In 1995, when Williams was in the ninth grade, her father pulled his daughters out of Macci's academy and took over all coaching at their home. When asked in 2000 whether it would have been more beneficial for them to have followed the normal path of playing regularly on the junior circuit, Richard responded, "Everyone does different things. I think for Venus and I, we just attempted a different road, and it worked for us."
detectable_format:title, detectable_content:postscript, keywords:letter_frequency