Federer joined the ITF junior circuit at age 14. He entered the circuit in mid-1996 and played his first ITF junior match at a Grade 2 tournament in Switzerland.
That step came after an increasingly successful period in Swiss junior tennis. At 13, Federer won the Swiss national Under-14 championship and was selected to train at Switzerland’s National Tennis Centre in Écublens. The move placed him in a more demanding national development environment shortly before his international junior debut.
Federer’s junior career progressed quickly. He won the Wimbledon boys’ singles title in 1998, reached the US Open final, and finished that year as the world’s No. 1 junior. Although he had another junior season available in 1999, he chose to move full-time toward the ATP Tour. The age is sometimes confused with his national-centre enrollment, which occurred around the same period but was not the same milestone.