Meet Frances Tiafoe’s Parents, Alphina and Frances Tiafoe Sr.

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Frances Tiafoe grew up in College Park, Maryland, the son of two immigrants from Sierra Leone who came to the United States in the 1990s to escape a civil war. His father worked maintenance at a local tennis center, while his mother worked night shifts as a nurse. Together, they built a life that made Frances’s career possible. Now one of the most recognizable players in American tennis, Frances has reached a career-high ranking of world No. 10, three U.S. Open semifinals, and a French Open quarterfinal.

Below, get to know Frances Tiafoe’s parents, Alphina and Frances Tiafoe Sr.

Meet Frances’s mom, Alphina:

Alphina Tiafoe (née Kamara) was born in Sierra Leone and came to the United States in 1996 after winning a green card lottery, leaving behind a country in the grip of civil war. Alphina met Frances Sr. after she settled in Maryland. In 1998, the couple had twin boys: Frances Jr. and Franklin. She built a career as a nurse practitioner, working long hours and often overnight shifts to help keep the family stable while her husband worked at the tennis center. In a 2020 essay for The Player’s Tribute, titled “Nurse Mom,” Tiafoe explained at length about the impression her work ethic left on him.

“That ‘zone’ that I have to get into when I'm down a set or something like that? That exists for my mom when things are getting chaotic in the nursing home and you need a calm head to make decisions that, in the end, are way more important than a tennis match,” he wrote. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, he asked her to stay home. She went to work anyway. “Because she loves to work,” Frances wrote. “Because she and Dad don’t really know the meaning of a break. Because they got your back.”

Meet Frances’s dad, Frances Sr.:

Constant Tiafoe, known as Frances Sr., emigrated from Sierra Leone to the United States in 1993. Per Tennis.com, he came from a relatively well-off family back home, but started over in Maryland, eventually finding work in 1999 as a day laborer on the construction crew building the Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park. When the facility was finished, he was hired as its head of maintenance and given a spare office on-site to live in, a roof over his head that also gave his sons a world. Frances and Franklin spent a lot of time at the tennis center with their father for most of their early childhood, picking up trash, sweeping courts, and eventually picking up rackets. On nights when their mother was working, their father slept on the massage table so the boys could have the couches.

“Dad always loved tennis, and he worked around the clock at the JTCC so he could keep that job, and so Franklin and I could have a place to play the game we’d fallen in love with,” Frances wrote about his father in The Player’s Tribune. “I realize now how hard he worked, and how much he sacrificed, to allow my brother and me to chase our dreams and have the life he and my mom wanted us to have—the one they couldn’t have in Sierra Leone.”

In 2023, Frances launched a $250,000 fund in his own name in conjunction with the USTA Foundation, the charitable arm of the sport’s national federation. Now having surpassed $1 million in total funds raised to date, the fund supports youth tennis, education, and mentorship in under-resourced communities. Frances first announced the scholarship program at the JTCC, with his parents beside him, and gave $50,000 directly back to the facility.

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