Week 45 - Challenger ($35,000+H) - Yeongwol, South Korea (hard)

Salmon · Tennis legend

RE: Week 45 - Challenger ($35,000+H) - Yeongwol, South Korea (hard)

Coup Droit · Tennis legend

Eduoard Roger-Vasselin is my favourite example. Now age 29, he's finally just made it into the top 50. A more 'average' player you'd never see - nothing really to get excited by, just a solid game and a pretty good attitude, that usually ends up losing.
But by plugging away he's made it and I'm pleased for him because he was always a major 'also-ran' as far as French tennis was concerned (and fair enough given his results).
I don't really know enough to enough to voice an opinion about the individual British players (is there a possibility that doubles is rated higher here and so some of the better second tier players give up earlier on singles and head for exclusive doubles ?)
But I also am a big fan of James McGee and, in fact, all the real 'honest triers' as Salmon says (and I also agree that there's no real difference between WR200 and WR100 and that it's too easy to be satisfied with minor achievements).
I am glad that the LTA says that top GB rankings are now going to be ignored (daft idea to put worth on being GB number 3 if that's only WR 250 or whatever).
Bottom line, it does come down to the individual players but if your peer group is a group of WR500 players, all happy if someone makes the QF of a 10k futures, it's difficult to break out. Sounds harsh but it is strange that more of our 'decent' players haven't achieved what other 'decent' players have achieved.

indiana · Tennis legend

I have always thought that Colin Fleming far from ever reached his full potential in singles.

I think he was top 400 before he went to uni, came back unranked and relatively quickly got back into the top 400 again, with some decent wins and encouraging losses. But then too soon for my liking ( but maybe understandably, and not a bad choice as it has transpired ), turned exclusively to doubles.

However, even with Colin there were must have been real doubts ( not least from himself ) about how high he could get at singles.

I tend to agree with Salmon here that the movements to doubles have had relatively little effect on our position re top singles players. These who have moved were generally pretty unlikely to be top 200 players, and almost certainly not top 100 players. If you had any real pretentions to be a top singles player, you just wouldn't move to doubles. Not quite going to make it, but with an aptitude for doubles, then it is understandable.

Coup Droit · Tennis legend

It's interesting and I expect you're both right - I really don't follow doubles well enough to have a worthwhile opinion.

But Salmon's point about Eduoard RV is right i.e. he must have felt that he was a player who was never going to quite make it as a singles player, years of dithering about in the 200+ area. And yet a very competent doubles player. But he never made the exclusive commitment to doubles and so was able to peak in singles late in his career (as more and more do).

I couldn't help feeling when I read Dom Inglot's recent interview (and having see him play singles recently on the livestream) that that was a singles player lost - again, someone who would have come through later in his career and made his mark.

But the doubles question, almost certainly, is only a tiny factor (if it's a factor at all) - there's obviously a whole heap of other key points.

korriban · Challenger level

Coup Droit wrote:
It's interesting and I expect you're both right - I really don't follow doubles well enough to have a worthwhile opinion.

But Salmon's point about Eduoard RV is right i.e. he must have felt that he was a player who was never going to quite make it as a singles player, years of dithering about in the 200+ area. And yet a very competent doubles player. But he never made the exclusive commitment to doubles and so was able to peak in singles late in his career (as more and more do).

I couldn't help feeling when I read Dom Inglot's recent interview (and having see him play singles recently on the livestream) that that was a singles player lost - again, someone who would have come through later in his career and made his mark.

But the doubles question, almost certainly, is only a tiny factor (if it's a factor at all) - there's obviously a whole heap of other key points.

I don't agree about Dom (he has an awesome serve and some good shots, particularly volleying, but I fear his footwork, movement and speed would never be good enough to support a good singles career), but I do agree with the more general point about decent singles players hedging their bets for longer.

Coup Droit · Tennis legend

I get you point Korri, and agree as per the status quo now, but don't you think that if Dom had continued with his singles career then his footwork and speed and movement would have all got better, by force? i.e. the reason his serve and volleys are so good are because that's what he does, day in day out, it's what he practices, it's his day job.
If his day job had been to play singles, even if his movement wasn;t his strong point, it would have improved and he;d have been forced to work on it.

Ed RV was a pretty slow guy round the court for a long time, very gangly, no explosive speed - it's still not his strength, I think it just got better over time.

Salmon · Tennis legend

I'd love to know what people thought of Dodig when he was 21/22, because when he turned 24, he was ranked 422 in the world [CH of 256]. I guess Boggo, Baker, Evo, Wardy, Coxy, Goodall and Bloomers, all had higher peaks by the age of 24! But that's when the penny somehow dropped and now he's probably a match for anyone outside the top 10.

2003-2008: $68,730
2009: $65,611
2010: $191,353
2011: $645,735
2012: $524,730
2013: $1,179,455 and at least $62,500 (that he'll get from the WTF)

Now if you had told me in early 2009 that this guy would make it to the top 100 one day, I'd probably have said that ,"if he works hard, he has an outside chance". But he's actually pulling about $1.3m/year right now, which is more than what Nishikori*, a guy who's probably had everything paid for him** since his teenage days, makes. Tennis can be funny.

* of course, Nishikori is immensely more marketable than Dodig, so he surely attracts far more sponsors and probably some appearance money, too
** and rightly so

Spectator · All-time great

I think it has made eminent sense for our recent doubles specialists to become doubles specialists, and unlike almost everyone else on this board, I'm glad they did. I like doubles, and it's fun watching British players compete at the highest level. But it's revealing that for the players who went to university in the US, the only ones in the past decade to have been All Americans in both singles and doubles - which, having just wasted part of a Saturday morning by scanning the lists, appears to be where most of the successful post-university players come from - have been Ken Skupski, Dom Inglot and Neal Skupski. Indeed, the first time I noticed the senior Mr Skupski was a singles match, when he played the Liverpool exhibition and went 3-6, 6-3, 10-7 with David Ferrer. All of the above have super attitudes and work ethics and, like CD, I strongly suspect that they could have been quite serious challenger players and in a few cases possibly Tour-level players in singles had they wanted. Ditto Mr Fleming, and - had they not had various illnesses/injuries - Mr Hutchins and Mr Marray.

(Incidentally, comparing what they did in Challengers at 23-25 may not be much help for this lot - because they almost all went to university, they almost all started on the Tour at 23. Mr Skupski, if his rankings are anything to go by, wasn't even playing futures until 24, at which point he went from unranked to 547 in a year. Not spectacular, but I think we'd generally take that as evidence of having potential.)

I suspect the reason for the jump in all save the injury/illness crowd was common sense: they were almost all used to paying their own way; they almost all came in as mature people; they all had other career options; and many of them were thinking of starting families. Did they faff about in futures for a few years, seeing whether they could make it and earning not enough money to keep themselves going, let alone a family? Or did they do something which they already knew they did well - in most cases better than they did singles because doubles played to their particular strengths- which would give them the opportunity to go on the Tour proper and would enable them to keep a family?

Aware that this will play to the "doubles shouldn't pay anything because then people wouldn't leave singles to go into it" sentiments that are sometimes voiced. But I think it at least challenges the "any old person who picked up a tennis racket could do well in doubles" sentiment that sometimes accompanies it!

Salmon · Tennis legend

Spectator wrote:

(Incidentally, comparing what they did in Challengers at 23-25 may not be much help for this lot - because they almost all went to university, they almost all started on the Tour at 23. Mr Skupski, if his rankings are anything to go by, wasn't even playing futures until 24, at which point he went from unranked to 547 in a year. Not spectacular, but I think we'd generally take that as evidence of having potential.)

I had high hopes for Skupski when he was younger (indeed, you may even be able to embarrass me by finding a couple of old posts where I talk about him having a chance of making it to the top 100 wink ), but I think what he did in Challengers at 23-25 is quite helpful, because he didn't do much. And he didn't do much because he wasn't good enough (but still very good, of course), and not because he went to Uni.

Ultimately a college degree won't make you much younger, so a player cannot shift the goalposts too much just because he started late. After all, the top college players are probably better than Futures players in many occasions, so they're not plying their trade in a weak circuit. Indeed, most collegiate players who go on to make the top 100 are good enough to do well in Futures/Challengers even before they are done with their education, such high is the standard.

I'd genuinely like to see post-2000 examples of players (collegiate or otherwise), who weren't regularly beating top 250 players by the age of 25, but stayed in the top 100 for more than 10 weeks in total. There must be a few lurking in there, but it should be an almost-negligible fraction of the whole.

And of course, let us put all this "top 100 hoopla" into context. 100 is just another number, just like 81 or 126, and I'd say that Boggo has had a better career than Martin Lee did. After all, one can make a reasonably good living from being a very good Futures player, too, and Skupski definitely could have had success at Challenger level.

Spectator · All-time great

Thanks, Salmon, for that really interesting and helpful link ... and your point that those former university players who are going into the top 100 in singles generally move into the top 300 within their first year out is well taken. I would say, though, that it takes a little time to adjust to the Tour: so if we were looking at two similarly-ranked players of 24, one of whom had been playing full-time on the circuit since 18 and one of whom had just entered the previous year, I'd be inclined to think that the new entrant had perhaps a slightly better chance of being underranked than the veteran. That's not something where I've done detailed comparisons, though ... so could well be wrong.

Looking specifically at our players, I wasn't actually arguing that all of the players I mentioned could have been top 100 but that they "could have been quite serious challenger players and in a few cases possibly Tour-level players in singles" - so I think we may actually be saying quite similar things! Like you, I think Mr Skupski could have been a good challenger-level player ... though I actually think with his work ethic and willingness to improve, he could possibly have done more. And like CD, I think Mr Inglot would have had quite a good shot at going beyond Challengers.

Salmon · Tennis legend

Salmon wrote:

I'd genuinely like to see post-2000 examples of players (collegiate or otherwise), who weren't regularly beating top 250 players by the age of 25, but stayed in the top 100 for more than 10 weeks in total. There must be a few lurking in there, but it should be an almost-negligible fraction of the whole.

I think the person who comes closest to this, from the current guys, is Dreddy Brown. He wasn't even dominating in Futures when he was younger* and not for one moment did I think that he'd move on to the big stage. Now there's no exact science to determine when he first showed potential, but I fix it to be in 2009, when he was 24y 6m old, he qualified and reached the final of a Challenger in Karlsruhe.

Given how much he enjoys his tennis, I see him sticking around for a while, so he may even get to the top 50 at some point of time, even though he has plateaued a bit right now. Now why couldn't one of our boys become like Dustin? Or even, why couldn't Dustin become one of our boys?

* On an unrelated note, Jamaica held 22 Futures in 2002! And Amadeus Fulford-Jones received a wild card into five of them...