Ben Shelton licked his lips as he prepared for another battle. The eighth seed at the Australian Open and his third-round opponent, Valentin Vacherot, have both come a long way since their paths crossed in the semi-finals of the Southeastern Conference men’s tennis tournament in April 2021, as Shelton’s Florida progressed past Vacherot’s Texas A&M at the Billingsley Tennis Centre in Arkansas.
But the road they have both taken, from the NCCA college system to Masters champions on the ATP Tour, has been one of the defining aspects of the first week of the Australian Open in Melbourne. The men’s draw has been flooded with players who rose through the rowdy crowds of the NCAA and emerged hardened for life as a professional. There were 25 men in this year’s Australian Open main draw who had come through college, the most since 2009. Of that group, a handful, including Shelton, Vacherot and the 25th seed Cameron Norrie, are through to the third round.
“I think college players are dogs for the most part,” said Shelton, who made his big breakthrough at the Australian Open in 2023 when he reached the fourth round on his first trip outside the United States. “I don’t feel like there’s that many college players who come on tour and make it and are soft. I think you’ve got to get used to dealing with a lot when you’re in college. Not everything is catered to you.
“Being a professional tennis player is a very self-centred job. Everything is catered to you, what your team does for you. You have all these people trying to make your life easier, and you can kind of lose sight of life, I guess.
“But when you’re a college player, you better keep your grades up in school and focus on school, or you’re not going to be eligible. You’ve got other teammates who you’ve got to uplift. And the coach isn’t just thinking about you, he’s thinking about all 10 guys.
“You’ve got to think about how you can be a better teammate, because if you go into a college team and you think everything is about you, life is not going to be fun and the guys on the team aren’t going to like you. So I think that’s some of the lessons that you learn being a college player, and I think that it definitely builds character.”
Not everyone can be like Carlos Alcaraz, and go from the juniors to the professional tour and become a grand slam champion as a teenager, or Jannik Sinner, who took a little longer than his current rival to challenge for grand slams but still made his debut in the top 10 at the age of 20. Shelton described the college system as a “stepping stone” to the challenger circuit, the level of tennis below the ATP Tour that the 27-year-old Vacherot almost exclusively played on before he became the lowest-ranked Masters champion of all time in Shanghai last October.
It wasn’t always this way. Ten years ago, with the exception of a couple of Americans, in John Isner and Steve Johnson, it was a rarity for players to come through college and make it into a tournament like the Australian Open, or feature on tour. Now there has been a resurgence. “College tennis is getting a lot more talent,” said Shelton. “It used to be, like, if you go play college tennis, your tennis career is dead.”
A couple of recent success stories have proved to be inspirational for others. During his time at Florida, Shelton’s father and coach, the former professional Bryan Shelton, would highlight the steady progress of Norrie, who went from crashing a moped during a night out while he was a student at Texas Christian University to grinding his way into the world’s top 200, then the top 100, then the top 10, an Indian Wells champion and Wimbledon semi-finalist within five years of leaving the Horned Frogs.
Norrie, the British No 2, is one of the toughest competitors on the tour. At the grand slams, he thrives in the rowdy atmospheres that are commonplace in the NCAA when rival inter-conference schools meet, absorbing the noise and, at times, hostility, that would be expected in college basketball. At the Australian Open, Norrie’s second-round win over Emilio Nava came on Court 7, the party zone located away from the Rod Laver Arena, which has a balcony bar overlooking the action.
Norrie’s time at college showed other British players that it could be a path to becoming a pro. Jacob Fearnley, the British No 3, also went to TCU, while Arthur Fery, who qualified for the Australian Open main draw for the first time and upset the 20th seed Flavio Cobolli in the first round, spent three years at the prestigious Stanford. Other international players include Vacherot, the Monegasque, his French cousin and Texas A&M teammate Arthur Rinderknech, as well as Argentina’s 21-ranked Francisco Cerundolo and Portugal’s Nuno Borges.
“It’s very different to going pro straight away,” Fery said. “I wasn’t quite ready for the pro tour at 18 when I came out of juniors. I wasn’t ready to travel 35, 40 weeks a year. College was a great experience. You obviously get a world-class education at Stanford. At the same time you can play loads of matches, develop as a player. You are left to your own a little bit, more than if you have a travelling coach all the time with you. It’s character-building for sure.”
Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe stand out among the list of individual men’s NCAA champions, but their titles came in the 1970s. More recently, being the top-ranked college player was no guarantee to making it on the professional tour.
But that is starting to change, as well. Shelton was the NCAA champion in 2022, and was ranked in the top-20 in the world a couple of years later. Ethan Quinn, champion in 2023, is through to the third round in Melbourne. The current two-time NCAA champion is Michael Zheng, who came through qualifying to defeat the former Australian Open semi-finalist Sebastian Korda on his run to the second round, even though he is still yet to graduate from Colombia and will be returning home from Melbourne to complete the final year of his psychology major.
Eliot Spizzirri, the top-ranked college player out of the University of Texas in 2023, will get a shot at the defending Australian Open champion Sinner. At 24, he is through to the third round of a grand slam for the first time, having beaten rising star Joao Fonseca in his opening match to join the contingent of American college players putting together career-best runs.
“There’s really good camaraderie amongst us,” Spizzirri said. “I feel like we genuinely want each other to win. And so when I see other college guys do well, it gives me confidence. And I think the other guys say the same. But in terms of characteristics everyone’s genuine, authentic, hard-working, tough, selfless. They’ve kind of done it all, just because you’ve been in a team environment for so long.
“The level has gotten higher in college. I don’t know exactly why it is. Maybe good coaching. The resources are unbelievable. When I went to college I was told I’m getting top-10, top-20 in the world level resources for four years as a 17-, 18-year-old. So you really do have the chance to maximise your potential. I don’t know if guys looked at it like that 10, 15 or 20 years ago, but I certainly think guys look at it like a stepping stone to the pro tour. Not like, Oh, I’m going to college, that means I’ll get a job that’s not tennis after.”
A few months after Shelton left college, he and Vacherot met in a Challenger match in Las Vegas. Shelton won 6-7, 7-6, 6-4. “We had an absolute war,” he remembers. Now, they get to take it to the big stage, with the conveyor belt of talent coming through the college system not far behind.
