A lot can change in a year in tennis. While the past year has only reinforced the iron grip of Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner on the men’s tour (and the immortality of Novak Djokovic), the wheel of potential challengers has spun again and landed on new names.
This time last year, it was Britain’s Jack Draper. He reached a first major semi-final at the US Open in 2024 and continued a meteoric rise from there, beating Alcaraz at Indian Wells before going on to win his first Masters title in the Californian sunshine. A run to another Masters final in Madrid followed; by the summer, he was ranked fourth in the world.
But already things were beginning to unravel. His short senior career had previously been stalled multiple times by injury and a persistent pain in his all-important serving arm, which he first felt during the clay season, turned out to be bone bruising, an innocuous-sounding issue compared to the likes of an ACL rupture, but one which has refused to go away.
The rest of his 2025 was fragmented. A decent grass swing came to a juddering halt with a second-round loss at Wimbledon. He did not play singles again until the US Open, where he only played four sets, then withdrew before the second round. One step forward, two steps back.
His 2025 season ended in September; the hiatus continued through the Australian Open – evidently going from zero court time to best-of-five was a bad idea – and he only returned to the ATP Tour in Dubai last month. He has won one and lost one ATP match this year. An auspicious beginning to a title defence, it is not.
Draper arrives in Indian Wells after a year of flux, both on and off the court. He has a new coaching set-up, having dispensed with the services of longtime coach James Trotman late last year and brought in Jamie Delgado, best known for coaching Andy Murray to a second Wimbledon title and the year-end No 1 in 2016.
He has signed a new clothing deal with Californian brand Vuori, reportedly worth $5m, and started a YouTube docuseries with his sponsor detailing his comeback. Venturing into other fields – he is also a Burberry ambassador – has provided him with an off-court outlet but is also indicative of how much players have increasingly become products, and how much control young players across the board are now taking over their image, with career longevity never guaranteed.
His physical struggles have obviously been a source of enormous frustration, and no doubt recall the issues which hampered him earlier in his career. The 24-year-old plays with a huge amount of force: a whip-cracking forehand and a violent serve that puts significant strain on the body. A growth spurt in his late teens and bulking up over the last couple of seasons have made him a more complete player, but it has come at a cost, almost as if the speed of that improvement has outstripped his body’s ability to cope with it.
But the lengthy layoff has given him time to work on his game, and to strip things back to the fundamentals. He has a remodelled serving stance, and said before Indian Wells: “I’ve worked a hell of a lot on my transition game, my volleys. And I’ve actually hit more serves than I’ve ever hit because I’m hitting them 20 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent and so on.”
If those changes can round out a game which has hitherto largely been based on power, it may conversely make him more of a threat against the likes of Alcaraz and Sinner – players who are difficult to physically batter off the court. And it may help his physical resilience too. Delgado, too, brings a depth of experience in working with injury-prone players, from the famously creaking Murray to Grigor Dimitrov.
In California last year, Draper was part of a new generation on the charge; this time around, he is something of an unknown quantity. He has not been handed a favourable draw, with Djokovic his likely quarter-final opponent.
He was equal parts confident and realistic in his pre-tournament press conference, as if trying to convince himself as much as the watching media. He said: “I feel like I wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be in the tournament, if I didn’t feel like I could go all the way again”, but then added: “I do recognise that I have been away from the game and it is a bit of a step up in level to just come straight back to it after that amount of time out of the game. So let’s see what happens. I’m not overthinking things too much.”
Last year’s final offered a cautionary tale. It was a lopsided affair as Draper swept past another bright young thing and former Masters champion, Holger Rune, in straight sets. The 22-year-old is another who has been tipped to challenge the duopoly of Alcaraz and Sinner, another to reach a best ranking of No 4, and another victim of the brutal impact of the tennis tour on athletes’ bodies. The Dane endured a horrific Achilles injury in October and has been sidelined since then.
The tennis tour needs serious reform to avoid feeding yet more young talent into the meat grinder, but that’s a topic for another day. As things stand, Draper is in a position he has been in many times before: out of injury hell, but with a long road ahead to get back to his best.
His own stratospheric rise over the last couple of seasons, followed by all the frustrating setbacks, will no doubt have given him a more realistic, pragmatic viewpoint going into this season than simply charging in, desperate to defend his title. It may be that rather than a glorious new dawn, this Indian Wells campaign will be something less flashy but more sustainable: two steps forward, and maybe only one step back.
