Why is the U.S. not generating any top-ranked men's tennis players? Originally answered on September 14th, 2016.
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Answer by Laurence Shanet, Former College/Satellite Tennis Player, Tennis Coach, and USRSA Certified Stringer:
Truly elite tennis players (meaning those ranked consistently in the top 4 in the world for long spans of time) are like unicorns. They are special unique creatures that come along only once in a great while and the formula for creating them is something that no one has a firm grasp on. There is no method for consistently producing those players in today’s game, and no country has dominated world tennis by doing so in the last 20 years. It seems to be possible to institute conditions that are favorable for producing world class players in general (let’s say top 150 in the world), but not for creating truly elite players and Grand Slam champions.
If you look at the last 15 years in men’s tennis, there have been nine players ranked #1 in the world: one person each from Serbia, Switzerland, Australia, Russia, and Brazil; and two each from Spain and the United States. And only five of the nine held the ranking for over a year in total. So there is no country that has dominated the top of the game in a significant way. It is pretty reasonable to conclude that in today’s global tennis world, no country can consistently produce top 4 talent much better than the others. The reason that the United States perceives this as a sudden slump is that we are still thinking back to the days when tennis was not as global, and there wasn’t nearly as much money at stake.
Tennis as a truly professional competitive sport is actually very young, when compared to other professional sports such as soccer, football, baseball, and basketball. The so-called “Open Era” was the first time that the sport took on the full mantle of professionalism, and that started in 1968. So pro tennis has only existed in any real way for for 48 years. (And the ATP didn’t start their ranking system until five years later.) At the dawn of “open” tennis in 1968, only a few countries had any infrastructure for developing top tennis players, as tennis had yet to catch on in Asia and parts of Eastern Europe.
Up till that time, the United States, England, Australia, and France had been the primary participants in competitive tennis, and there was little motivation for players other countries to get in on the action, since there wasn’t much money at stake.
Answers that point at things such as court type, training methods, coaching and other factors mostly miss the point. At any given time, there can only be 5 people in the world in the top 5…by definition. So things like talent pool and training systems don’t really matter, as long as certain basic conditions are met, like the availability of good competition and good coaching. And all of the major countries involved with tennis can offer this.
Going forward, it is very likely that no one country will produce top-ranked tennis players in a completely dominant way, because champions are very hard to produce, and more flukes than the products of great effort.
For more insight on the production of top tennis players, see my writing here.
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