A tennis coach assaulted and verbally abused his daughters in his obsessive drive to turn them into Wimbledon champions, a court was told yesterday. John De’Viana, 55, spat and swore at the girls from the ages of nine and ten and denied them meals if he deemed their performance inadequate, Snaresbrook crown court was told. Mr De’Viana, from Essex, was alleged to have removed the girls from school and enforced gruelling all-day training regimes which began at 5.30am and involved running around tennis courts for hours on end. If he felt they were not training hard enough, Mr De’Viana would allegedly call the girls “motherf***ers” and “fat, lazy c***s”. Monaei, 21, and Nephe, 19, have given up the sport since their alleged abuseNephe De’Viana, now 19, was forced to carry her kit in a black bin bag because…

Source: The Times March 08, 2017 00:52 UTC