Riccardo Piatti

Riccardo Piatti (born November 8, 1958) is an Italian tennis coach. He has coached several players ranked within the top 10 by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), including Novak Djokovic, Ivan Ljubičić, Richard Gasquet, and Milos Raonic.

Piatti began playing tennis at the age of nine at the tennis club of Villa d'Este in Cernobbio, Italy. The idea of becoming a tennis coach first occurred to him around age 20 when the head coach of the Villa d'Este tennis club became injured, and Piatti was asked to replace him.

He spent formative years learning to coach at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy (which was later absorbed into IMG Academy), in Bradenton, Florida.

Piatti began as a private coach for professional players in 1988. Among the early players he coached are Renzo Furlan (career-high world No. 19),Cristiano Caratti (career-high world No. 26), and Omar Camporese (career-high world No. 18).

He began working with Ivan Ljubičić in June 1997, when Ljubičić was ranked No. 954 in the world. This relationship lasted until the end of Ljubičić's professional playing career in 2012. Ljubičić achieved a career-high ranking of world No. 3 while working with Piatti.

From fall 2005 until June 2006, he also coached Novak Djokovic at age 17 and 18. Djokovic parted ways due to Piatti's refusal to work full-time with him. In 2011, Piatti claimed that he knew then (in 2006) that Djokovic "could become number one in the world at the level of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer because Novak always worked hard as a kid, with the family, and he was very focused and determined to be world number one."

In February 2011, while still coaching world No. 14 Ljubičić, Piatti began to co-coach Richard Gasquet (with Sébastien Grosjean), who was then ranked No. 31 in the world. With Piatti, Gasquet improved to a high ranking of world No. 9, short of his career high No. 7 (achieved in 2007). Piatti ended the relationship abruptly in November 2013 during the season-ending 2013 ATP World Tour Finals.

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