MELBOURNE, Australia — After the early rounds of the Grand Slams, Ben Shelton was once a loner, one of those rare college tennis pros and teenage prodigies who was able to find his own business path.
A lot has changed in a few years. During the middle weekend of this Australian Open, Melbourne Park transforms into a gathering place for former NCAA champions and standouts.
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These include Shelton, the 2022 NCAA men’s singles champion, and Peyton Stearns, who won the women’s championship that year. Ethan Quinn, who won the following year, was also there. But championship pedigree is not a prerequisite.
On Saturday afternoon, Shelton, a former University of Florida Gator, watched his old rival, Monaco’s Valentin Vacherot, who plays for Texas A&M, through the net in a third-round game. He said playing against a college student provided extra motivation for him to win 6-4, 6-4, 7-6(5). Another opponent, former Texas Longhorn player Eliot Spizzirri, brought defending champion Jannik Sinner to Rod Laver Arena as it was the hottest day of the tournament so far.
Spitzri, who plays in the Texas heat and often trains in sweltering South Florida, got Sinner to his feet early in the third set, which tied the match, before heat rules closed the roof and changed playing conditions, helping the cramped defending champion avoid a possible exit.
Sheldon wasn’t surprised.
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“College players are mostly dogs,” Shelton said after his first-round win over Hugo Humbert, who still hit the first pitch and let out a “yeah!”
“Dog” is the highest compliment Shelton can give to other players. This is a player who fights to get what they want, rather than asking others to give it to them. A player who goes the extra mile on the practice field, a player who’s willing to stick up for his partner, a player who won’t quit a doubles game even if he’s just finished playing singles, and would rather do anything than hit more balls.
In college, Dog was the player who kept grades up, cheered his teammates on, and knew the coach had 10 players to worry about instead of just one.
“Coming into a college team, if you think it’s all about you, life won’t be fun and the people on the team won’t like you,” Shelton said.
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“I think it’s definitely character-building.”
It is also increasingly becoming a place for elites to build their tennis careers.
Go back 15 years, or maybe even just 10 years ago, and college tennis players were very much part of the sport’s underclass, somehow making it to the stage despite their NCAA experience rather than because of it.
Go back five years, or even a few years, and many in the tennis world viewed their successes as happy accidents, like Cameron Norrie who became a Wimbledon semifinalist and Indian Wells champion after four years at Texas Christian University, or Danielle Collins, who became a Virginia Cavaliers player and eventually reached the Australian Open final because she couldn’t afford to turn pro after high school.
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Today, there is a growing consensus that unless a player is the next sinner, Carlos Alcaraz or Mira Andreeva, spending a semester to five years on an American college campus feels like the smartest choice in the world.
When the main draw began, there were 25 men and 9 women with college experience participating in the main draw. According to the Intercollegiate Tennis Association, by the round of 32 there were eight former college players in the Melbourne men’s draw, the most since the tournament was held at Kooyong Lawn in 1987. Stearns and Diana Schneider, two women with college experience, made it to the third round before exiting.
“I told everybody, if I did it again, I would go to school, I would go to Georgia,” Tommy Paul said. He decided to skip college after winning the French Open men’s title in 2015. Now 28, Paul is not ready, mentally or physically, to compete with men. “Especially now that people are getting paid to go to school to play, I would tell a lot of 17- and 18-year-olds to go to school.”
In addition to scholarships that cover education, room and board, college athlete salaries are just the beginning.
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Not long ago, tennis programs were little more than an afterthought for athletic departments at all but a handful of colleges, having to raise money for football and basketball teams (so-called revenue sports).
Over the past two decades, athletic departments and coaches have become more aggressive in increasing private donations to fund nonprofit athletics, building coaching staffs of assistants, strength and conditioning specialists, nutritionists and mentors to help athletes maintain their academic performance when needed.
The funding helped the coach recruit more international coaches. About 60 percent of Division I college tennis players are foreign-born. Coaches attract them with the same perks that attract America’s top athletes – lots of good coaching and personal attention, and high-quality facilities that are on par or higher than the National Tennis Federation training centers in their respective countries.
“The resources are unbelievable,” Spitzri said after his second-round win over Wu Yibing earned himself a matchup with Sinner, where he displayed the tenacity that has long characterized college players. “When I went to college, I told myself, ‘Listen, as a 17, 18-year-old kid, I’m going to be in the top 10, 20 resources in the world in four years.'” So I think you do have an opportunity to maximize your potential. “
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The growth in international enrollment has largely freed college tennis from an age-old criticism — that players entering the NCAA face a much shallower talent pool. Good players can win without training hard or missing out on the social joys of American college life.
That’s not the world experienced by the former college players heading into the tournament, who have received plenty of reinforcements this week, starting with Michael Cheng’s first-day victory over Korda. Zheng Zheng, a two-time NCAA champion from Colombia, used his firmness to neutralize Koda’s explosive power and full-court fluidity.
Vaccello, last fall’s surprise star who emerged from nowhere as a qualifier to win the Shanghai Masters, isn’t surprised. He said he still follows college tennis closely and he keeps seeing Zheng’s name and reading about him
“If you’re an NCAA national champion, you’re in the top 100,” Vaccello said after his first-round win over Martin Damm Jr. Vaccello won a major title in China while ranked 204th in the world and is now the No. 30 seed in the majors. Martin Dahm Jr. is an American who chose to skip college and has battled injuries the past two years.
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“I’m really not surprised at all to see him beat the top 50 players.”
One of the costs of attending college has long been the inability to earn substantial bonuses of more than $10,000 per year. Prior to registration, any winnings in excess of $10,000 must be applied toward the tournament fee for which the winnings were earned; after registration, winnings are included in the annual fee.
Zheng is the rare college athlete who gets a windfall upon graduation and maintains spring eligibility. Additionally, new sponsorship rules allow college tennis players to earn extra money while playing for their school. Reese Brantmeier, who won this year’s women’s singles title, is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the NCAA seeking to overturn the bonus rule.
The deficit between college and professional funds isn’t the only huge chasm players have to overcome: Switching from college to the ATP or WTA tours involves a pretty serious adjustment in tennis and physical fitness. Former pro and longtime Texas A&M coach Steve Denton said in a recent interview that players who jump straight into high-level tennis without the rigors of college sometimes find that their bodies can’t handle it.
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Football and basketball players talk about how much the game speeds up when they make the jump to the NFL, NBA and WNBA. Spizzirri said he went through the same thing when he left Texas and became a full-time pro in 2024.
“It’s definitely a different rhythm,” Spitzri said Thursday after his win over Wu.
Even when he practices with someone ranked between 150 and 300, and practices with someone ranked between 50 and 100, he can feel it. But if they can get into the rhythm, he and other college players will reap some intangible benefits from experiencing the raucous atmosphere of the college game.
Some Croatian fans began to take notice of Stearns during her second set match against Petra Marchenko on Thursday. One time they used obscenity, Stearns went after them, just as she did back in Texas and playing a major antagonist like Oklahoma.
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She glared at them as she hit the winning shot. She won a crucial point when her ball hit the net. Instead of apologizing to Marchenko, she shook her fist at the fans.
“I In the beginning, you know, feeding bananas to monkeys is the best way to put it, but that’s counterproductive, so you shouldn’t do it,” she said.
But she had been in this situation before and knew how to cut through the noise and settle down, winning the final five games of the match 6-2, 7-5.
“When that energy flows toward my opponent, I almost use it as a deflector, like, let’s win the next point so you can’t hear it,” she said. “The best way to silence an audience is to win, and if you want to silence them, that’s what you have to do.”
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After the game, she wagged her finger at the harasser and that was it. She was unable to beat Amanda Anisimova in Saturday’s third round, but Stearns had not won a match in her two previous Australian main draws. Even before Saturday’s court appearance, the week felt like a victory.
Quinn had a similar experience against Hubert Hulkac on Thursday, when a group of Polish fans chased him and cheered after he missed a serve. Quinn missed college as he left after just one year. Then at a stadium in Melbourne, he felt like he was back in school, playing for the Georgia Bulldogs against a nasty opponent.
“It’s really special,” he said at a news conference after the three-set victory. “I love it. It doesn’t matter where I am. If they’re cheering for me, for me, for everything, I just love being in that atmosphere.”
Quinn’s locker in Melbourne is right next to Shelton’s. He was pretty sure they were the two loudest people in the room.
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He heard Shelton call college players “dogs” and didn’t object.
While in Athens, Ga., he quickly learned that students and student-athletes can get lost if they are not careful. The ones who succeed are the ones who know how to do things for themselves—find a hitting partner for extra drills, see a strength and conditioning coach for extra weight training.
“That’s certainly a trait an NCAA champion might have,” he said. “They’re willing to go out and get it, and they’re going to be vocal about it when they get it.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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