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New York Times
6 days ago
- Sport
- New York Times
Tennis fathers and sons: Stefanos and Apostolos Tsitsipas, and other ways to coach
Editor's note: July 2024, 2025: This feature has been updated following Stefanos Tsitsipas' decision to split with Goran Ivanišević and resume his coaching partnership with his father, Apostolos. When Goran Ivanišević, who coached Novak Djokovic during 12 of his 24 Grand Slam title runs, decided to work with Stefanos Tsitsipas in spring 2025, he was effusive. Tsitsipas, a two-time major finalist undergoing a steep decline in form, could be a top-10 player again. He had the tools. But Ivanišević also had one condition. Advertisement His father, Apostolos, who knows Stefanos perhaps better than anyone in tennis, could not be part of the coaching team. So that's what happened. Ivanišević signed on for a trial period. Tsitsipas played three matches at two events, losing two of them. Ivanišević criticized his preparation. Tsitsipas spoke obliquely about wanting his team to be like a family. And then it was over, with Tsitsipas resuming his partnership with Apostolos and the intimate knowledge that comes with it. That's one advantage of being coached by your father. But the disadvantages have also been on full display in the past year – and probably a good deal longer – courtesy of world No. 29 Tsitsipas,and his complicated relationship with his father. They broke up as coach and charge in early August of 2024, following an ugly confrontation during Tsitsipas' loss to Kei Nishikori, the world No. 576, at the National Bank Open in Montreal. Tsitsipas told his father, who has never been shy about getting in his ear during matches, to leave his seat in the middle of the loss. Then he blamed Apostolos for his career stagnation and his struggles with his forehand. The next day, he announced that his dad would remain his travel companion but would no longer coach him. Apostolos took a different view. He did not accompany his eldest son to that year's U.S. Open, choosing instead to work with his youngest boy, Pavlos, who is battling his way through the sport's Futures circuit. He had been coaching and traveling with Stefanos for the past 10 years. 'I just need to move on now,' Tsitsipas said during an interview last month at the West Side Tennis Club in New York's Forest Hills district. The club was the home of the U.S. Open until the short move to Flushing Meadows in the 1970s and Tsitsipas was there to practice for the Ultimate Tennis Showdown, an innovative and lucrative competition established by Patrick Mouratoglou. Advertisement 'I need to grow up as well and take decisions based on my own gut feeling,' he said. Just under a year later, his gut is telling him to go back to his dad. It doesn't take Sigmund Freud to know that relationships between fathers and sons are often complicated in the best of circumstances, before factoring in the tensions and logistics of professional tennis. Roughly 10 months of living out of suitcases and hotel rooms; the monotony of daily practice and physical training; the sometimes touchy process of reexamining the losses that can pile up. That's a pretty good recipe for friction, even with the most perfect coach and the most emotional player, let alone the possible landmines of the fraught father-son dynamic. And of course, all of this usually unfolds during late adolescence and early adulthood, a period of life in which growing boys generally don't want their dad joysticking them. They don't want to be told what to eat, when they should sleep, and how they should have done something that they messed up. When Alexander Zverev, Ben Shelton, Casper Ruud and Tsitsipas too play matches, there will be several crucial moments that will all play out the same way — in one sense. They will look up at their support team in their box. They will meet their coach's eyes and they will know exactly what they are saying to each other, even though no actual words will need to be exchanged. Why would they? The message will be coming from the person who has known them longer than just about anybody else, who can speak to them with nods, tilts of the head, or a widening of the eyes. 'Some players, if they have their parents as coaches, there's a lot of arguing,' world No. 3 Zverev, whose father, Alexander, and elder brother, Mischa, coach him, said in a news conference after he beat Brandon Nakashima in the fourth round in New York last year. 'There's a lot of, you know, not healthy stuff. I have to say that's not the case with us at all. We understand each other.' Advertisement Things can get a bit tense, like when Zverev was on the verge of losing an early-round match at the French Open last May. His head was about to explode. All he could think about was reaming out his team, including his father, for giving him a bad game plan. 'It's always the team's fault,' he said later after he had come back to win, even when the main players on that team are his father and brother. So why do it this way? Over the course of a decade, Apostolos Tsitsipas came to believe that only he could give his eldest son what he needed to succeed at the highest level. 'I can feel his mindset,' he said back in March 2024. 'I can feel when his mindset starts changing.' 'When the senses are there, he's present,' Apostolos said. Stefanos agreed with all this for years, even as he experimented occasionally with a second coach, such as Mark Phillippoussis. Then came the explosion in Canada. The two men talked that night. 'A tough thing that hurts,' Stefanos said of the breakup conversation. He compared it to a spouse breaking up with a partner. But it had to happen. He continued: 'I've been feeling more in control of my own emotions, of how I want things to be. That's what gives me the freedom of feeling, more free, more alive. I can really pinpoint what I want and what I don't want.' How uncomplicated this might have seemed had Tsitsipas won some matches at the year's final Grand Slam. Then it's a clear and correct decision. Instead, he lost in the first round, struggling to find the drive and desire to respond when the unseeded Thanasi Kokkinakis, the world No. 86, overpowered him. Tsitsipas still had no regrets about his coaching decision, though. He needed something a little less complex, win or lose. Until he didn't. When talking to sons who have hired their fathers and stuck with them, their relationships somehow seem devoid of that complexity, which ordinarily comes with the territory. 'I can almost sense what he's feeling,' Christian Ruud, a former touring pro and father of three-time Grand Slam finalist Casper, said during an interview in 2024. Advertisement Casper said he sees his dad as more peer than parent. Christian is 52 now and was 26 when Casper was born. A young father, who somehow still seems young in the eyes of his Gen-Z son. He gets the jokes between Casper and his contemporaries. When on tour, they pass much of their downtime playing golf, competing in a season-long competition with each other and one of Casper's friends. That usually includes an annual 600-mile (1,000km) drive from Cincinnati, venue for an ATP Tour event in the middle of August, up to New York City for the U.S. Open. They stop along the way at the best courses they can find. That may be the only setting in which Christian seems a little older. He plays from the white tees now. Casper and his pal play from the tips. 'I look at him more as a friend,' Casper said of his father during an interview in New York last year. 'It's not an easy balance, but we've been able to do it really good so far.' That's a little different from the Zverev clan. Having his dad and brother around can make him a little less homesick, Alexander said, before joking he only needs tennis-specific doses of family time. 'Off the court, I just spend zero time with my father, so that's a starting point,' he said. 'We have enough of each other on the court.' Christian Ruud coached his son through his childhood, but Casper needed to be in a warmer climate, with better players than those in their native Norway. He spent the better part of three years training in Alicante, Spain, with a coach named Pedro Rico. Rico was unable to become his full-time traveling coach, so he asked his father if he would take the reins again. It wasn't an easy decision: Casper has two sisters. But Dad decided to give it a go. He can sense when his son will win a match, Christian says. He sees an aura of confidence around him. It's probably invisible to everyone else because Casper has one of the better poker faces on the tour. Christian can also sense the nuances in his son's looks of frustration. There's the look of annoyance at an opponent who is hitting the lines on every point, about which Christian can do little. Then there are the times their eyes meet when a game plan isn't working, to which Christian can respond with a signal. Advertisement When matches and practice are over, the more indirect lessons begin — cards, golf, movies, sometimes followed by a serious talk about what they have just watched. At some point this will end, Casper has said. His father has other children and a wife, Casper's mother, whom he wants to pay a little more attention to. But for now, they have this. Ben Shelton and his father Bryan are just getting started — or should that be getting started again? Bryan coached his son through childhood and then in college at the University of Florida. He missed Ben's first year on the tour, while he was finishing up his work at Florida, then joined him full-time for the second half of 2023. Ben has said it's far easier now than it was when he was in college, where he was one of 12 players. He felt then that his father would go out of his way to show there was no favoritism, at the expense of his leg muscles. 'I'm running more sprints than everyone else when I do something wrong or show up late,' he said then. 'If I lose a match, it's a bigger deal than everyone else. He had to do that to keep the team in the right place.' Now his father (Ben has occasionally called him 'Big Dog'), doesn't have to do that. Making him run extra sprints is the job of his fitness coach. Plus, if Ben wants to go out to dinner with friends on the road, his father is perfectly content to order room service and watch golf on his computer, or read. Again, seemingly so uncomplicated. Even more so after Ben had to spend his first eight months on tour without his father, the college coach who had given him such a hard time the previous couple of years. 'I really started to appreciate everything he was bringing to the table for me,' he said. 'I was missing it during that time.' Additional reporting: Charlie Eccleshare
New York Times
6 days ago
- Sport
- New York Times
Stefanos Tsitsipas splits with Goran Ivanisevic, will resume coaching partnership with father
Two-time Grand Slam finalist Stefanos Tsitsipas says he has split with 2001 Wimbledon champion Goran Ivanišević after just two tournaments, as his latest attempt to arrest a decline in form flounders. Tsitsipas, the world No. 29, confirmed the end of their partnership in a statement issued by email. Advertisement 'Working with Goran Ivanišević was a brief but intense experience and a truly valuable chapter in my journey,' the 26-year-old Greek said. In a statement sent to The Athletic, Ivanišević said: 'We had a nice conversation yesterday. Nothing bad. He is going back to his father, back to his roots. 'He had his best results with his father, his father knows him the best so I agree that is the the right decision. I hope he gets back where he belongs and wish him all the best for the future.' The absence of Tsitsipas' father, Apostolos, from the coaching setup was an initial condition of Ivanišević's working with former world No. 3. Tsitsipas and Ivanišević announced their partnership during the French Open; Tsitsipas won their first match together at the Halle Open in Germany, but he then lost to Luciano Darderi of Italy. He next went out of Wimbledon in the first round, retiring with a back injury while two sets down to French qualifier Valentin Royer. Ivanišević then criticized Tsitsipas' fitness in an interview with SportKlub. 'He wants, but he doesn't do anything. All 'I want, I want', but I don't see that progress,' Novak Djokovic's former coach said. 'I was shocked. I have never seen a more unprepared player in my life. With this knee, I am three times more fit than him. This is really bad.' Following the tournament, Tsitsipas spoke obliquely in Athens about his priorities for his coaching team. 'It is very difficult to have dictators and people who speak negatively and you don't feel like they are close to you like family. Being able to build a family out of this, people who will not only work with you in the tennis part but will also be your friends after your career, is something that I really want to build,' he told Sdna. Tsitsipas has spent much of the past year trying to rediscover both the form, and love for tennis, that made him look like a potential major champion. In August 2024, he removed his father from his coaching team after a surprise defeat to Kei Nishikori, then world No. 576, at the Canadian Open in Montreal. Advertisement 'I need and I deserve a coach that listens to me and hears my feedback as a player. My father hasn't been very smart or very good at handling those situations,' he said. Tsitsipas has also switched rackets and attempted to make tactical changes to his game, hitting through his one-handed backhand more, especially on return. But he still lacks the backhand slice and chipped return that are now essential for success with a one-hander at the top of the sport. And like other male players of his generation, including world No. 3 Alexander Zverev, 2021 U.S. Open champion Daniil Medvedev, and three-time Grand Slam finalist Casper Ruud, Tsitsipas has spoken only about feeling left behind by changes to the sport accelerated by the ascendancy of Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, who have split the past seven majors. 'I feel like the lineup right now is much more difficult than it was back then. Players are so much more mature. Shots have changed. Players have second forehands in this very moment. They're playing with two forehands almost. I have to adapt my game,' he said ahead of the French Open, where he lost in the second round to Italian qualifier Matteo Gigante. 'I have to consider certain things moving forwards because it's growing a lot in intensity, and physically it has never been in a position like the way it is now. I see constant evolution and constant growth of the sport in terms of how the players are evolving and how much better they're getting over the years.' That defeat to Gigante saw Tsitsipas drop out of the top 20 for the first time since 2018. As he begins the next stage of his climb back, he will hope that his partnership with his father does not again descend into the maelstrom of 12 months ago.
The National
01-07-2025
- Sport
- The National
Stefanos Tsitsipas admits tennis future is unclear as he struggles with anxiety and fitness issues
On the eve of Wimbledon, Stefanos Tsitsipas sat in a small interview room with a few journalists and opened up about his struggles with anxiety. The Greek former top-three player sounded excited about hiring former Wimbledon champion Goran Ivanisevic as his coach, and believes the Croatian legend can help him fix various technical issues with his game. Tsitsipas added though that he was acutely aware that was not going to be enough. The 26-year-old admitted he had work to do in order to 'recalibrate my mental state' and that it was on him to find solutions for his current psychological woes. 'The last couple of years, especially the last two years, I feel like I have been very stressed and anxious and I only realised that now that all of this is really adding to me and it just doesn't feel like me when I'm out on the court,' Tsitsipas revealed on Saturday. 'So I just need to manage the stress better. It's something that will pop up, something that might happen again, but I need to manage those stressful moments. 'I need to manage moments of uncertainty and figure it out on my own. I don't want to have external stuff that are causing those types of things. 'So I need to soulfully be focused on my own individuality, my own self, and let anything outside not allow any of this to distract me.' Tsitsipas did not explicitly say what those external pressures or distractions may be, but his issues with his father, Apostolos, have been well-documented during the years he served as his coach. Tsitsipas has also previously complained that he felt his parents were 'too involved' in his life and he has felt the responsibility of taking care of his whole family from a young age – even making it a mission to play doubles with one of his brothers, Petros, in order to help him get into the top 100. Tsitsipas ended his coaching partnership with Apostolos on more than one occasion, most recently last August, in an effort to focus on their father-son relationship. He has had mostly lacklustre results since, barring a surprise run to the Dubai title in February, in what was his first tournament using a new racquet. When asked if he could pinpoint the source of his anxiety, Tsitsipas said: 'Well, my life is … I feel like not just my life, I feel like most players' life is chaotic, having to travel from place to place and then switching time zones and going from one place to the other. 'Doing this for so many years, I think it's quite normal that at some point you're going to reach a place of burnout or a place where you feel like you've had enough. 'But literally, you can't do anything about that because the nature of the sport itself is to repeatedly go one tournament after the other. 'I'm a player that has been playing the most amount of tournaments, the most amount of matches, I think. For three or four years, I was the player on the tour that had the most amount of wins in a single season. 'And there comes a moment, me and Goran spoke about it, there comes a moment where you pay the price and you can't have everything in life. 'Of course, it was great at the time. But internally, you're not aligned and you're not in peace with yourself. 'You're always chasing, you're always going after things. And sometimes when you end up also being surrounded by people that demand too much from you and you feel like you're responsible for not just yourself but for other people too … it creates this inner pressure, this inner anxiety that keeps increasing week after week. So it doesn't really help you with the tennis either. 'You feel like you're battling two worlds at the same time.' Two days later, Tsitsipas retired from his Wimbledon opening round against French qualifier Valentin Royer with a lower-back injury that has been bothering him on and off since the end of 2023. The Greek is a two-time Grand Slam finalist, but hasn't made it past the second round in any of his last five majors and is currently down to No 26 in the world rankings. After this latest setback on Monday, Tsitsipas once again shared some worrying thoughts with the media. This time about his physical state. 'I'm battling many wars these days. It's really painful to see myself in a situation like this,' said Tsitsipas. 'One thing that I absolutely hate doing is retiring or stopping a match, but I've never pictured myself being in a situation like this multiple times since the Nitto ATP Finals in Turin a couple of years back. 'Since that time, I've been very fragile with my body, and I've been battling a war of feeling healthy and feeling comfortable going to the extremes, which has been a difficult battle. So I really don't know. 'I feel completely … I feel like I'm left without answers.' Tsitsipas explained that the problem is in the lower left side of his back and it limits his ability to rotate his body while playing. 'It's probably the most difficult situation that I've ever been faced with, because it's an ongoing issue that doesn't seem to be disappearing or fading off as much,' he added. 'Myself, as a person, I have a limit at some point, so I'll definitely have to have my final answer on whether I want to do stuff or not in the next couple of months. 'This is going to be hard, but if I see it going in that trajectory, there is no point at competing. If I'm not healthy, and I've talked about health so many times, if health is not there, then your whole tennis life becomes miserable.' In the Greek portion of his press conference, Tsitsipas was clearer about his future in the sport, saying he'll give it one more year before making a final decision. 'If this develops into something that doesn't let me finish matches, I get my answer there. I mean I won't play tennis again for good,' he told SDNA.
New York Times
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Stefanos Tsitsipas hires Goran Ivanisevic, Novak Djokovic's former coach
Two-time Grand Slam finalist Stefanos Tsitsipas has hired former Wimbledon champion Goran Ivanišević as his new coach. Ivanišević, 53, will join Tsitsipas' team from the start of the Halle Open in Germany, for a trial period. Tsitsipas' father, Apostolos, who has been in his coaching box at recent events, will not be part of his coaching team at least initially, according to a report in Greek outlet SDNA. A representative for Ivanišević confirmed this element of the partnership to The Athletic, and said that Ivanišević will work full-time with Tsitsipas for a substantial number of weeks per year. Ivanišević believes Tsitsipas should be in the world's top 10 and has always got on well with him when their paths have crossed on tour. Advertisement Tsitsipas later confirmed the 'new coaching partnership' on social media. Tsitsipas, who will leave the the world's top 20 for the first time since August 2018 when the rankings update a week on Monday, has had a difficult couple of years and has brought on Novak Djokovic's former coach to try and arrest the slide. He most recently exited the French Open in the second round, losing to Italian qualifier Matteo Gigante Wednesday. Afterward, Tsitsipas spoke about how he is struggling to keep up with the demands of the tour, and how he has suffered physically in the aftermath of picking up injuries over the last few years. 'It's a constant puzzle,' he said in a news conference. 'Things have definitely changed over the last couple of years, and I know that I find myself in a completely different position now. ' Tsitsipas, 26, has spent much of the last year trying to rediscover the form and love for tennis that made him look like a potential Grand Slam champion when he burst onto the scene seven years ago. In August 2024, he took the radical step of removing his father from his coaching team after a surprise defeat to Japan's Kei Nishikori, then the world No. 576, in Montreal. Tsitsipas said he was 'disappointed' in his father's work in a news conference after that loss. 'I need and I deserve a coach that listens to me and hears my feedback as a player. My father hasn't been very smart or very good at handling those situations,' he said. Tsitsipas has since worked with Greece's Davis Cup captain, Dimitris Chatzinikolaou. He also switched rackets in search of a winning formula, but could not say what the new one was for contractual reasons. The profile — and an uncovered logo seen on a stringing machine in Dubai — suggested a Babolat Pure Aero 98 model. But at the French Open, he returned to the Wilson frame, after experiencing back pain using the newer racket on the clay. Advertisement His 2025 results have largely remained underwhelming — save for winning February's Dubai Tennis Championships in the United Arab Emirates — as he seeks a return to the early days of his career, when he thrilled the tennis world with his flair and shotmaking ability. When he returned to clay, which is his preferred surface, Tsitsipas suffered a disappointing quarterfinal loss to Lorenzo Musetti at the Monte Carlo Masters in Monaco. Tsitsipas was defending champion and had won the event three times in four years; the lost ranking points attached to the defeat saw Tsitsipas tumble to his lowest position for almost seven years. He then lost to Musetti again at the Madrid Open, before losing to Arthur Fils at the Italian Open in Rome. As a coach, 2001 Wimbledon champion Ivanišević is best known for the six seasons he spent with Novak Djokovic, in which the Serb won 12 Grand Slam titles. They split in March 2024. Ivanišević then briefly worked with fellow Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina at the start of 2025, but they parted following her fourth-round exit at the Australian Open. The split came after it became clear that Rybakina was still working with her previous coach, Stefano Vukov. Vukov has since been given a one-year ban by the WTA for breaching its code of conduct with his behavior, which chief executive Portia Archer described as amounting to 'engaging in abuse of authority and abusive conduct.' It's felt as though Tsitsipas has been searching for his tennis identity ever since Carlos Alcaraz thrashed him at the 2022 French Open. 'I do need a bit more of that Tsitsipas in my game. I'm trying to reinvent myself with that fearlessness,' he told The Athletic a month after being beaten 6-2, 6-1, 7-6(5) by a 19-year-old Alcaraz, referring to the early part of his career. Advertisement Being pummelled by the next big thing in men's tennis, having held and then lost that title himself, hurt Tsitsipas. It was the first of several visceral reminders that the Greek, who lost his two major finals to Djokovic, has been stalled not just by the 'Big Three' of Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, but also the ascendant Alcaraz and now Jannik Sinner. Tsitsipas has found himself confined to an awkward spot somewhere just below the very top, along with fellow 'sandwich generation' members like Alexander Zverev and Daniil Medvedev — though Medvedev has claimed the major title that has eluded the other two. As he approaches his 27th birthday in August, it makes sense for Tsitsipas to try something different. He's worked with Australian Wimbledon finalist Mark Philippoussis before, but bringing on a coach of Ivanišević's stature feels like a significant shakeup. Ivanišević too will relish this opportunity, after a difficult period working with Rybakina and the end of what was a very successful but at times volatile partnership with Djokovic. Like Tsitsipas, Ivanišević lost his first two Grand Slam finals. He then lost a third, but finally won at the fourth time of asking by claiming the 2001 Wimbledon title. Tsistipas has not reached the semifinals of a major since he lost to Djokovic in Melbourne just over two years ago. Ivanišević also has pedigree as a coach in guiding someone from outside the top echelons of the rankings to a major title, doing so in 2014 with Marin Čilić, who was the No. 14 seed when he won the U.S. Open, beating Federer en route to the final against Nishikori. Tsitsipas will be desperate for a similar uptick in his fortunes. He has the talent to climb back into the world's top 10 — he was ranked as high as No. 3 in 2021 — but his backhand has long hamstrung him away from clay, particularly when returning serve. Ivanišević is also one of the best servers in the history of the sport, especially on grass, and he'll hope to lift Tsitsipas in that area too. If Ivanišević can tighten some of the aspects where Tsitsipas has been struggling, and help with the mental side of how to go from nearly man to champion, then men's tennis could have one of its most exciting players back on song.
