Serena Williams Early life

Williams was born in Saginaw, Michigan, to Richard Williams and Oracene Price, and is the youngest of Price's five daughters: half-sisters Yetunde, Lyndrea, and Isha Price, and full sister Venus. When the children were young, the family moved to Compton, California, where Williams started playing tennis at the age of three. Her father, Richard, home-schooled Serena and her sister Venus. While he and subsequently her mother, Oracene, have been the official coaches, other mentors who helped her learn the game included Richard Williams, a Compton man who shared her father's name and would go on to found The Venus and Serena Williams Tennis/Tutorial Academy.

When Williams was nine, she and her family moved from Compton to West Palm Beach, Florida,[30] so that she could attend the tennis academy of Rick Macci; Macci began to provide 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".Richard stopped sending his daughters to national junior tennis tournaments when Williams was 10, since he wanted them to take it slow and focus on school work. Experiences of racism also drove this experience, as Richard Williams had heard white parents talk about the Williams sisters in a derogatory manner during tournaments.[36] At that time, Williams had a 46–3 record on the United States Tennis Association junior tour and was ranked number one among under-10 players in Florida. In 1995, when Williams was in the ninth grade, her father pulled his daughters out of Macci's academy and, from then on, took over all coaching at their home.