Drop shots in tennis go from eccentric to essential, with some help from Carlos Alcaraz

New York Times

28-05-2025

ROLAND GARROS, PARIS — When it happens, a hush descends over the tennis court. There's a split second in which the crowd realizes that the rhythm of the point has been irrevocably altered. A tennis high-wire act has begun, and Carlos Alcaraz and his drop shot are on the tightrope.
While it may look treacherous, the drop shot is not as risky as it looks for Alcaraz, who is its most effective exponent on the ATP Tour. He wins the point when he plays it 60 percent of the time, according to data from Tennis Viz that covers the past 52 weeks of matches outside the majors. That's the highest percentage of anyone on the tour.
Advertisement
Players at the French Open should expect to scramble forward more than ever if they face Alcaraz, the defending champion at Roland Garros. The shot is becoming more popular across the tour, and it's especially effective on clay, the surface for the second Grand Slam of the year. The drop shot is an effective antidote to players camping out well behind the baseline on what is generally the slowest surface. More recently, tennis balls have also become heavier. Combined with a slow court, the extra weight makes it harder to hit winners from the baseline. Ending a point with a short ball is comparatively easier.
Wednesday in Paris, Alcaraz engaged in a dropper derby with Fábián Marozsán, a Hungarian with a similar predilection for the shot. Alcaraz emerged victorious after paying for just one poor game by losing the second set, before resetting to win 6-1, 4-6, 6-1, 6-2.
'It's gonna be a drop-shot battle,' Alcaraz had said with a grin in a news conference Monday, aware that the first time they played, it was Marozsán who delighted the crowd with a string of delicious examples on his way to a shock straight-sets win in Rome.
'I'll be ready for that from him. I study my opponents a little bit. I know that Fábián likes to hit drop shots,' he said.
Marozsán hits the drop shot the fifth-most of anyone on the tour, with it accounting for 3.3 percent of his shots. Alcaraz is eighth, with 3.1 percent.
These small percentages have steadily risen over the past few years. In 2025, players have hit the shot 1.9 percent of the time across the tour, compared to 1.5 percent in 2021.
On clay, 1.7 percent has become 2.3, compared to 1.4 percent on hard courts and 1.8 percent on grass (which uses 2024 figures, because the 2025 grass-court season is yet to start.)
It has inspired change across the tennis world. No. 1s Jannik Sinner and Aryna Sabalenka have both started using the shot more regularly, exposing No. 3 Alexander Zverev and other players who suddenly look one-dimensional without having the shot in their repertoire. Four-time champion Iga Świątek, who used the shot frequently on her way to her first title here in 2020, is slowly starting to incorporate it back into her game after favoring a more linear aggressive style the past few years.
Advertisement
The shot has enjoyed a resurgence, partially because of Alcaraz and other high-profile exponents, but also because of a general homogenization across the tennis world. Variation has become a decisive edge, along with the return of serve on the men's side and the second serve on the women's.
At Roland Garros, more than any other major, the drop shot can make the difference. As Craig O'Shaughnessy, an analyst who has worked with Novak Djokovic, said in a recent phone interview: 'One of the deals on clay courts is that the ball is going to interact much more with the granules of clay.
'Get it right and the second bounce is so close to the first one, and typically lower, so the ball just dies — it's like hitting it into quicksand.'
The drop shot has always been important, but it was recently considered a bit of a last resort. Frequent use was seen as a novelty or a cop-out, the preserve of players who lacked proper power.
Albert Portas, an unremarkable clay-court specialist from Spain, stunned the field to win the 2001 Hamburg Masters behind a relentless stream of drop shots. It was a 1,000-level event, just below the Grand Slams, and Portas beat that year's U.S. Open champion, Lleyton Hewitt, and Alcaraz's coach and French Open champion, Juan Carlos Ferrero, on his way to the title. David Law, the ATP communications manager at the time and now a co-host of The Tennis Podcast, remembers Portas driving players to distraction. Law said in a phone interview that at that time, the drop shot being used so often 'really felt kind of revolutionary and like a bit of a troll.'
On the men's side, the advent of the Big Four era shifted things again, with all-court players like Djokovic and Andy Murray incorporating the drop shot into their game. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal did too, but the former initially described it as a 'panic shot'.
Advertisement
Murray's frequent use of the shot was a major source of dispute with American coach Brad Gilbert, who held the prevailing view that it did not befit a top player. 'He knows I'm not a big fan of the drop shot,' Gilbert said in 2007. 'Roddick sent me gray and the more Andy does that, the balder, I'll get.'
Having once disparaged the shot, it was essential for Federer when he won his only Roland Garros title in 2009. Nadal, whose opponents would retreat further and further behind the baseline in anticipation of his power, started using it too.
'We were working a lot on that and more so on clay where it's more effective,' Carlos Moyá, Nadal's former coach, said in a video interview last week.
The drip shot can be a clean winner, but it's also a way of discomfiting an opponent or setting up another shot: perhaps a pass or, in Murray's case, the lob. Lorenzo Musetti, another of its most effective users, said that what comes after it is as important as the shot itself in a recent interview.
O'Shaughnessy, who saw Musetti's drop shot dismantle Brandon Nakashima, one of his players, at the Italian Open, agrees.
'The drop shot doesn't sit in isolation. It's part of a setup, it's part of an ambush, it's part of a master plan.
'The way Brandon can counter that is by staying closer to the baseline. But the downside is, he may have to half-volley these high, heavy deep balls from Musetti.
'If my player is up against someone like Daniil Medvedev, who likes to stand so far back, you can really exploit him with the serve-plus-one drop shot. You're dragging him off the baseline where he wants to be and you're fatiguing him while taking him out of his comfort zone, so it has multiple benefits.'
The drop shot can also lead to a call and response, with the receiving player meeting finesse with finesse rather than fire. Djokovic is a master.
Advertisement
'It is sometimes cat and mouse, a tactical play between the two opponents,' he said in a news conference last month.
'But on clay, the counter drop shot is a good choice. It's a decision that is made in a split second. It's really almost with a prophetic vision of understanding the position of your opponent.'
There was a great example of this in the men's Italian Open final, in an exchange eventually won by Sinner after he and Alcaraz had both hit drop shots.
Part of the drop shot's popularity comes from the need for a disruption tactic on both tennis tours, on which pretty much everyone is now a phenomenal athlete who can move from side to side all day. Sabalenka has joined Yulia Putintseva, Markéta Vondroušová and Ons Jabeur as a standout on the WTA Tour, while Alcaraz leads the way for the men. The drop shot — and associated touch shots, including volleys and short, angled groundstrokes — were key to Sabalenka's U.S. Open win last September. She started using the shot at the 2024 Italian Open while injured in a match against Elina Svitolina, and it has stuck: in Paris, she said that the practices touch shots for around 20 percent of a given session.
'These guys can play from the baseline forever,' said Moyá of the homogenization of play. 'But if you make them move forward, then it's tougher, especially as nowadays most don't go to the net and don't want to volley a lot.'
While these tactical shifts are significant, any revolution needs a figurehead. Men's tennis has found the perfect avatar in Alcaraz, who has decisively shifted the drop shot from a novelty play into a weapon. On the women's side, Jabeur led the way on her runs to three Grand Slam finals. While the Tunisian is more off the cuff than the Spaniard, both players' attacking spontaneity is set against the backdrop of a planned-out strategy, like a comedian able to ad lib with the structure of their show holding things together.
Over the past few weeks, various players have credited Alcaraz with popularizing the shot.
Advertisement
'Carlos is kind of the first one to do it so well from the forehand side,' Casper Ruud, a two-time French Open finalist, said in a news conference Monday. Jessica Pegula, the American world No. 4, told a few reporters last month that she had been 'working on the forehand one, which Alcaraz has made everyone start doing.'
It was at the Miami Open three years ago that Alcaraz's frequent and hugely successful use of the forehand drop shot captured the attention of the tennis world. According to O'Shaughnessy's figures, Alcaraz won 35 of the 50 points when he played a drop shot at a 70 percent win rate. Alcaraz eclipsed that at the Madrid Open a few weeks later, where he won 59 of 77 points, including a drop shot.
'It used to almost always be a backhand down the line,' O'Shaughnessy said.
'And then all of a sudden Alcaraz comes along, especially that Miami run, and he starts doing it inside-out forehand cross-court. Before Alcaraz, I almost never saw that shot.'
Alcaraz believes in the shot so much that he has used it during the tightest moments of his two Wimbledon finals, both against Djokovic. He produced a forehand drop shot when trailing 0-15 serving for his first title in 2024, winning the point after backing it up with a spectacular lob.
In 2021, ATP Tour drop shot figures were split evenly between forehands and backhands, but forehands are now at 54.2 percent vs. 45.8 percent for backhands. More of those forehands are now going to the ad court (left side when facing the net) — 59.8 percent vs. 56.1 percent — while in general, the shot is being used in more attacking contexts. In 2021, 47.7 percent of drop shots were in attack; that figure is now 53.3 percent.
These differences — and Alcaraz's 60-40 win edge behind the drop shot — may not sound like much. But few players win much more than 50 percent of baseline rallies. In the same period, Djokovic is top of that metric with 56.3 percent; Alcaraz is fourth, with 53.6 percent. In a sport where total points won often land around 53 percent vs 47 percent, small margins make big differences.
Advertisement
More important than anything else, according to Jabeur, is unpredictability.
'I like to mess around with the players, and it's tactical, especially the combination between hitting fast and then doing the drop shot. I've had so many players come to me and say: 'I don't know what shot you're going to choose.' That's the beauty of it.'
Alcaraz himself believes timing is everything. 'You have to find the great moment to do it, because it is much better to do a not great drop shot but in a great moment than a pretty good drop shot in not a good moment,' he said in a news conference earlier this month. His superpower is his ability to disguise the shot — to make it look like he's about to unleash a 100mph forehand before changing his grip and feathering over a drop shot.
On the clay courts of Roland Garros, the drop shot will be key.
'When the clay season comes along, it's something that gets added to the game instantly,' the No.9 seed Alex de Minaur told a few reporters in April.
'The points take a lot longer to develop and that's why you see everyone using a drop shot way more frequently than on a hard court or a grass court.
'On a clay court, where it's quite dry and slippery, it's going to be a lot more effective.'
Key to combatting the shot, according to Ruud, is winning the first few points when the opponent tries them. If you can do that, 'most of them kind of back off doing it that much.'
Marozsán was mostly helpless to do so against Alcaraz in their drop-shot battle, with Alcaraz easing past the Hungarian. But other players have had more success against serial users of the shot.
Jakub Menšík, the Czech 19-year-old who won the Miami Open in April, faced Alexander Bublik in Madrid this month. His coaching team analyzed Bublik's drop-shot patterns before the match, and found that across the tournament, 95 percent went down the line. Menšík was ready for the tactic and triumphed 6-3, 6-2.
Advertisement
Before facing Marozsán, Alcaraz said he would 'put extra focus on that,' adding that he would try to ensure that his opponent wasn't in a position to hit them. Whoever he faces next will be ready for an onslaught — whether they can stop it is another matter.