What happened to american tennis the last male grand slam champion was andy roddick winning the
u.s open in 2003 and since then we had no male grand slam champions and i tell you guys that
when i was growing up my favorite players were john mcenroe jimmy connors andre agassi and pete
sampras i love american tennis players but when we look at the players today the highest ranked
male american player is john isner ranked at 25 in the world and no american is coming anywhere close
to winning a grand slam so in today's video i'm going to give you my opinion what i think happened
to american tennis so guys first of all i want to show you something here the courts are completely
empty and take a listen to that sound over there these are pickleball courts and they are always
packed you can hear that pickleball noise this is happening here in southeast florida
very often that you'll see nobody on the tennis courts but absolutely packed pickleball courts
and if you follow me for a while i know that i love to do research i love numbers and i'm going
to provide some facts that might surprise you so american tennis is not in as bad of a shape as
people think it is for example the female american tennis players they are by far the most dominating
nation in the tennis world i'm going to give you some numbers that are going to surprise
you so there are 18 female american players in the top 100 this is by far the most out of any
country the next country behind the united states is the czech republic with nine players in the top
hundred followed by russia with seven romania with five and france and spain with four so there's
absolutely nothing wrong with american tennis on the female side this has always been the case that
the american females are dominating the sport of tennis and why is this the case well one possible
reason is that females are very strongly encouraged to do sports in the united states
while this might not necessarily be the case in some other countries now in the past american men
have dominated tennis and this has changed quite a bit but these numbers that i'm about to give you
will surprise you there are still a lot of american male players in the top 100. if you take
a look at the amount of players in the top 100 the country that has the most is france with 11
followed by spain with 10 and the united states comes in third with nine players in the top 100
of the atp rankings now while this might sound good this is also a little bit alarming because
the united states is actually a great place to become a professional tennis player because
we have the beautiful weather we have the most amount of courts out of anywhere in the world all
the best academies are here all the best coaching is here in fact most of the european players will
come to the united states to build a professional tennis career so while being third in the world
might sound great if we compare the united states which is a huge country to a small country like
italy who actually has seven players in the top 100 and they're coming in at number four
in the world ranking so just that's that alone can tell you that there's a lot of good players
in europe now in fact there's nine europeans in the top ten and there are 71 europeans in
the top 100 of the atp rankings so why are the european men dominating professional
tennis well first of all the question of why the united states doesn't have a grand slam champion
it's not so much europe's fault but it's more the fault of the big three and there's actually
some countries within europe who are experiencing the same problems as the united states countries
like germany or sweden who used to be super powers in tennis they are not doing that great
as of now and even a country like australia used to be a superpower in tennis only has
four players in the top 100. so why is this the case why are european players dominating the world
ranking see 71 percent europeans in the top 100 that is a big number there has to be a reason
why this is the case and this has been going on for a long time now many of you guys know that i
grew up in germany and i played high-level tennis in germany and then i came to the united states
and played college tennis so i can tell you a little bit about my experience comparing europe
versus the united states and i cannot speak for entire europe i'm gonna just speak of germany
because that's where i grew up playing but other countries are going to be very similar so here's
what happens to a good player in germany you're going to start off playing junior tournaments
just like here but then much earlier than here in the united states you're going to
start transitioning to adult tennis and this is where in my opinion the problem lies see there's
a lot of great juniors in the united states and junior tennis is very competitive from the ages
to 10 to 14 but then once players get a little bit older the transition for male players from
the junior circuit onto the adult circuit is much better in europe compared to the united states and
the reason why is the following so when i grew up i played junior tournaments and i was doing
really well i was among the top 20 best juniors in germany but then very early on at the age of 15
i started playing adult tennis meaning i was on a adult team these are professional leagues
that have many different divisions and it starts in germany with bundesliga and then goes all the
way down to kreisliga and this is something that every player participates in and not only that
but they start very young sometimes at the age of 14 or 15. so when i was 15 i started playing
on an adult team while also continuing to play on a junior team but not only that i started playing
adult tournaments these are prize money tournaments that are based on a national ranking
that's very accurate and this national ranking in germany is based not on the points you collect at
the tournaments but it's based on the quality of players that you beat so it's extremely accurate
and the way this national ranking is structured it starts with the atp players so they're going to go
first so for example now alexander zverev will obviously be number one in germany and it goes
down the rankings all the way to the last guy that has atp points so atp points always have precedent
over regular ranking points so this is a highly accurate ranking that you're going to use when
you play for a club and if you're ranked very high in germany you also can get paid for it and
now when you play for a higher division you're going to face really tough competition meaning
a lot of teams in germany will purchase foreign players with atp points so the level is very
high so when i was 15 16 i was already playing against players who had atp points and i was
also using the ranking points that i collected during the league matches to start getting into
tournaments these german prize money tournaments were limited in the draw so there was 32 player
draw or 64 player draw with qualifying so it was based on your national ranking whether you could
get into this tournament or not and the prize money was very high between 2000 to 5000
euros for the winner so this means that are going to be a lot of high-level atp players entering a
tournament of that level now a lot of you guys ask me whether i play futures see i started teaching
very young and i never wanted to leave my area in germany and travel and be gone for a long periods
of time so i actually never played futures in germany but many other players have so in addition
to playing the professional leagues playing these very competitive prize money tournaments
players also have the option of playing futures and because your europe is so dense you don't really
have to fly to these futures you can take your car and drive you can find a lot of futures close by
to where you live so think about it this way i did this for three years before going to college and
when i came to college i already had a maturity as a player that many of the american players
that i was facing in college didn't have and the simple reason is they did not play adult tennis
they continued to play junior tennis until the age of 18. and this is not because they're weak
players there's a lot of great players in the united states in juniors but the transition
from juniors to adult tennis is something that's very difficult see there's not something that
you can see with the naked eye players will look like they have great strokes but there's
a maturity to a tennis player they can only be developed from playing at a certain level when
you play at a high level your level will go up if you continue playing at a lower level
your level will likely not rise above so when i came to college i won 90% of my matches playing
at position number one with a very good schedule because my coach mel purcell was able to get us
a really tough division one schedule and i won all my matches and the reason
why was not because my forehand was better or my backhand was better it was simply that i was more
mature of a player i was exposed to a higher level of tennis than many of my counterparts in college
and this is not just me saying that 75 percent of the top hundred in division one men's tennis
are europeans just very similar to the atp rankings and very interesting is that when i
finished college baylor won the ncaa men's title with six europeans and then almost 15 years later
wake forest won the ncaa title with six european players as well which tells you that really not
much has changed when it comes to college tennis and also not much has changed when
it comes to professional men's tennis as well i'm gonna give you a link in the description of
a great ted talk from a player named eric butorac who was a division three player who went to france
who has a very similar system to germany and he played for the clubs there and also played
prize money tournaments and he managed to become one of the greatest doubles players in the world
and he had a great ted talk talking about some of the similar things he experienced
that i did so what is the solution to american tennis well i think the one thing that's really
bad about american tennis is that there is really no national adult ranking see the national ranking
on the usta is based on points and you just cannot do that because i can guarantee you guys that you
do not know who the number one tennis player is on the usta you probably never heard of that person
and everybody knows that john isner is the number one american tennis player so he should be number
one so there has to be a precedent for the atp players and then the college player so it has
to be a system where it's based on level and not solely based on points because somebody can
just simply play a bunch of tournaments collect a bunch of points and then be top 10 in the nation
there also has to be more prize money tournaments similar to the ones they have in europe with big
purses where it's going to attract a lot of high-level players because if you're
offering for example like here in florida i used to play a lot of prize money tournaments
for when i moved here the winner would get 500 bucks or even less sometimes 300 bucks and no atp
player is going to sign up for a tournament like that so the level overall is going to be very
weak but if you offer high purse prize money tournaments there's going to be a lot of atp
caliber players signing up and this is going to be good for everybody it's going to be good for
the juniors who are going to enter these tournaments they're going to be exposed
to a higher level of tennis now one thing that's going to be very difficult to change
in the united states is the club system see there's a lot of tradition in europe with the way
clubs work this is not only for tennis it's for soccer it's for all sports the way these leagues
are structured this is not something that's going to be easy to replicate here but there
needs to be some kind of club environment where players can play for a team at a high level to
get that high level match exposure so guys look at this we got four courts here nobody playing this
hurts my heart because i love tennis and also i love american tennis and i hope that we get
a lot of great american players who's going to win grand slams because that's what's going
to excite a lot of people it's going to bring back the interest in tennis i hope that there's
going to be a change made and we get back to the glory days of mcenroe connors agassi and sampras