When should tennis players turn pro during college? Ethan Quinn has a story to tell

New York Times

23-04-2025

When it comes to making major life choices, choosing one route to the top of tennis over another on the outcome of a single point wouldn't figure to be a great idea.
So maybe it's not so surprising that for long stretches of the past 18 months, Ethan Quinn has been feeling like he made a terrible mistake.
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Quinn was a point away from losing the national college tennis men's singles title in 2023. A freshman, playing in the biggest match of his life, he was down a set and a service break and facing triple match point against Ondrej Styler of Michigan on a steamy spring day in Lake Nona, Fla.
Lose any of those points, or the fourth match point he faced after saving the first three, and Quinn heads back to the University of Georgia to continue his college career. But in one of the ultimate Sliding Doors moments, he won them all. He won the next set, too, and with it, the NCAA title.
Two months later, instead of preparing for his sophomore season as a Georgia Bulldog, Quinn found himself on a practice court on Long Island, N.Y. with Jannik Sinner. He was getting ready to play his first ATP Tour main-draw match at the U.S. Open, thanks to the automatic wild card that goes to the collegiate champion — along with the host of other opportunities that appeared too good to pass up in the afterglow of his triumph.
It didn't take long for him to start thinking that maybe he should have passed them up after all.
'I thought I was going to come on tour and explode like Ben Shelton did, or Alex Michelsen,' Quinn, a 21-year-old native of Fresno, Calif. with wavy blond har and a boyish visage,' tells The Athletic. 'I thought I was going to take it by storm. That didn't happen.'
Nearly two years since Quinn's decision, he has evolved into a better tennis player but also into a fable whose ultimate lesson remains unknown. There are dozens of college players right now weighing whether to leave for the pro ranks. With Quinn, every win and loss becomes an accelerant or a speed bump, another data point to help answer the question that hangs over these first years of his career: Did throwing himself to the wolves after somehow escaping from triple match point on an opponent's serve help or hinder his development?
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He got another data point April 22, when he beat the Brazilian veteran Thiago Monteiro in three sets to qualify for the main draw of the Madrid Open. In keeping with his style, he clawed through, climbing back from a set down to prevail in two tiebreaks on a surface he has only the most modest familiarity with.
'On the dirt that is a really good W,' Brian Garber, his day-to-day coach, wrote in a text message after it was over.
At the time of Quinn's decision to turn pro, he didn't have too many people telling him not to leave college. He'd accomplished his main individual goal, though not every NCAA champion leaves immediately. Both Emma Navarro and Danielle Collins returned to the University of Virginia after winning the women's championship there.
One of the loudest voices was Brad Stine, who helped Jim Courier become the world No. 1 and now coaches Tommy Paul. Stine had been guiding Quinn's development since he was a young boy, and he was unequivocal about which of the forking paths to take.
'I pushed him to turn pro,' Stine said in an interview this month.
He knew how much Quinn loved his near-perfect undergraduate life at Georgia. Girlfriend, star athlete, playing matches in front of 3,000 rabid Bulldog fans. Staying is the easy, comfortable choice, Stine told him. The tough choice is to leave.
Quinn was just the fourth freshman to win the NCAA title since 1977. The win helped him earn the Hurd Award, a $100,000 grant to assist his transition to pro tennis. Stine felt that he needed to cash in by collecting the money and the opportunities from wild card entries, as well as deals with sponsors looking to bet on his potential. Working with his representatives at GSE Worldwide, Quinn joined a growing wave of young players with a deal from the Canadian clothier Lululemon. He got a racket deal with Babolat and a national television spot with Prudential during the 2023 U.S. Open. Orgain, the protein drink company, recently became a sponsor.
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'I said: 'I think you're going to be successful, but you are looking at a minimum of two years to make the top 100 and those two years will not be easy,'' Stine said.
He was right about that.
Quinn went 5-9 on the Challenger Tour from early July through mid-October of 2023. In 2024, he had stretches of winning just a match or two a month. His biggest weapon is his massive forehand, and in college it often didn't come back across the net. It does in the pros, and it comes back more and more, with more and more interest, the higher he moves up the ladder.
As ridiculous as it might sound, Garber swears Quinn has one of the biggest forehands in the world when he can tee it up.
'Ask Tommy Paul, he'll tell you,' he said. 'In college, that forehand and the fear of it won him so many matches. He could hide his backhand. You can't do that in pro tennis.'
'I had some regret, honestly,' Quinn said. 'I was like, 'Man, am I cut out for this?''
It's still too early to reach a conclusion, if that is even possible. There's no counterfactual narrative to compare it with. But while Quinn has hardly been an overnight sensation, his trendline is pointing in the right direction under Garber, a Stine disciple who previously helped get Aleksandar Kovacevic, another American college product, from the 300s into the top 100.
Quinn finished 2023 as the world No. 344. By the end of last year he was at No. 202. He began this year with six wins, before losing in the final of the Canberra Challenger to the Brazilian sensation Joao Fonseca, who beat him 6-4, 6-4 in a loss that has aged quite well. Then he won and lost a match in the Australian Open qualifiers.
He's now up to No. 115, which puts him on the cusp of the top 100 and direct entry into the Grand Slams. He's gone from losing to Challenger Tour players to beating them more often than he loses. He's gone from losing in ATP Tour qualifiers, to winning matches there, even against seasoned veterans with top-10 giant-killing pedigree like Monteiro, who beat Stefanos Tsitsipas at last year's Madrid Open.
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Quinn beat two European veterans with years of red-clay experience earlier in April, topping the maddening dropshot specialist Corentin Moutet and the former world No.12 Borna Coric in consecutive three-set matches in Barcelona before losing to Carlos Alcaraz in the round of 32.
On paper, it looks like a smooth and steady climb. Living it through it week to week has been a different story.
Quinn has missed Athens, one of America's great college towns. He has missed his friends. He has missed being on a team. The lonely grind, mediocre food and at times depressing accommodations of the lower rungs of professional tennis don't help matters.
On visits back to campus, he speaks with his college coach, Manuel Diaz, one of the best of his era. They talk through his second thoughts and his doubts. Diaz, who retired last year, helped guide former pros John Isner and Mikael Pernfors when they played at Georgia. He has seen versions of this before.
'In our sport you are going to be challenged and questioned,' Diaz said in an interview. 'You are going to question yourself, and you have to figure out how get around that monster.'
Garber and Stine have never shied away from that challenge, nor the question about road not taken. Early on, every time Quinn lost he'd tell them he thought he should be back in college. During a particularly discouraging stretch, when Quinn was lamenting his choice, they told him that if he wanted to go back to college, he should.
'We told him we wouldn't hold it against him,' Garber said.
Quinn had continued to take classes remotely after he left. It would have been a little complicated to regain his eligibility, and it would have cost him some prize money. But it was doable. If that's where he wanted to be, he should go, they told him. Quinn stayed the course, figuring this adjustment was going to be tough no matter when he tried to make it.
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Garber has tried to help Quinn change from a one-weapon college player into a versatile professional. Stine told them to start nearly every day working on his crosscourt backhand. He had a tendency to leave it in the danger zone where good players can dance a few steps backwards and turn the ball into a forehand kill shot.
'I want his crosscourt backhand to hang in an exchange with Djokovic,' said Stine, who streams all of Quinn's Challenger matches. 'And Brian is getting him there.'
Inevitably, there have been some valleys. Last August, after Quinn barely showed up in an ugly first-round loss in Lincoln, Neb. in front of about five people, Garber told him to take a few days and decide whether he still wanted him and Stine to stay on. Quinn called a couple days late to say he did. To say that the loss — and the sloppy one before it — was on him, not them.
Late last year, Garber came to Stine with an idea of his own. He thought Quinn, who is a shade under six feet tall, needed to change his serve from a platform stance, with his feet apart, to a pinpoint stance, where he launches up after drawing his feet together. Jannik Sinner made a similar change in 2023 to raise his contact point and add power; his serve effectiveness has since become his main point of difference to his closest rival, Carlos Alcaraz.
Garber had noticed that Quinn's hips were tight. He felt that launching from the pinpoint position would help him speed up his hip rotation and get more oomph behind the ball.
He's now regularly hitting serves above 130 miles per hour and has hit 143 mph on the radar gun. He's also added a serve variation, the slider out wide on the deuce side, to pull his opponent outside the tramlines and open up the other side of the court.
Garber has also helped Quinn develop a four-step routine to help him reset his brain after an emotional point or game. Go to the towel for a breath, do a two-step shuffle on the way back into position, think about how you want to play the next point as you bounce the ball, look up and go.
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'Make a plan and then commit to the plan,' Garber said. 'Simple as that.'
He's even gotten something of a team to replace the one he left at Georgia. He, Kovacevic and Paul are all based in and around Boca Raton, Fla. with a few other players. Taylor Fritz lives nearby. Frances Tiafoe comes around. They train with Franco Herrera, Paul's longtime trainer and one of his closest friends. Quinn said he watches and learns.
'Working out with guys that are top-10, doing the same things, being really professional, that's helped me know that I could go on court and be really physical throughout the length of a match and really challenge the top players,' Quinn said.
Paul, he said, who spends every spare hour he can find on his fishing boat, has also taught him the value of having a release, so life isn't all about tennis. He's gotten into thrifting during his travels, and he's also become a major coffee nerd. He's got his own machine, a scale and other gadgets at home.
'There's a lot of times where I'm just spending time in coffee shops, watching them make coffees and just trying to scale it, and then I will use what I've watched to kind of take to my own machine,' he said.
That's not working so badly in tennis either.