Tennis fathers and sons: Stefanos and Apostolos Tsitsipas, and other ways to coach (2024)

NEW YORK — When Alexander Zverev plays his quarterfinal match at the U.S. Open Tuesday, there will be several crucial moments and they will all play out the same way — in one sense.

Zverev will look up at his support team in their box. He will meet his 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 the 27-year-old longer than just about anyone else – his father, also Alexander, who can speak to him with nods, tilts of the head, or a widening of the eyes.

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“Some players, if they have their parents as coaches, there’s a lot of arguing,” world No. 4 Zverev, whose elder brother, Mischa, also coaches him, said this weekend after he beat Brandon Nakashima in the fourth round. “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.”

That’s the advantage of being coached by your father. But the disadvantages have also been on full display this season – and probably a good deal longer – courtesy of world No. 11 Stefanos Tsitsipas,and his complicated relationship with his father, Apostolos. They broke up as coach and charge in early August, 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 the 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.

“I need to grow up as well and take decisions based on my own gut feeling,” he said.

It doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to know that relationships between fathers and sons are often complicated in the best of circ*mstances, 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.

Things can get a bit tense, like when Zverev was on the verge of losing an early-round match at the French Open in 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. “I can feel when his mindset starts changing.”

He insisted that this kind of understanding can only come from being there during meals and at bedtimes, day after day and year after year, explaining how he would repeat phrases he had used with Stefanos since he was a small boy, trying to get him to enjoy the moment through the comfort of remembered childhood. In times of crisis on the court, he would tell his son to enjoy the feeling of wiping his face with his towel or sipping a cold drink during the changeover.

“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, just under a month ago, came the explosion.

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 feels he needed something a little less complex, win or lose.

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 earlier this year.

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. “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.

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

(Top photo: Julian Finney / Getty Images)

Matthew Futterman is an award-winning veteran sports journalist and the author of two books, “Running to the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed” and “Players: How Sports Became a Business.”Before coming to The Athletic in 2023, he worked for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Star-Ledger of New Jersey and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is currently writing a book about tennis, "The Cruelest Game: Agony, Ecstasy and Near Death Experiences on the Pro Tennis Tour," to be published by Doubleday in 2026. Follow Matthew on Twitter @mattfutterman