ATP Tennis Podcast: Fritz Discusses Mentality, Tsitsipas On Grass Record

This week on the ATP Tennis Podcast...

TAYLOR FRITZ ON WHY HE GIVES HIS COACHES FEEDBACK – “I want to tell the coach what I’m thinking in situations, why I did this, why I did that, because in my head it should give them a better understanding of why I’m hitting this shot, why I’m doing this in this moment, instead of them just telling me what to do. I’m not going to lie, sometimes I think my tennis IQ is very high and I just want to explain where I’m coming from. It’s really just a better understanding type of thing between us and not me being stubborn.”

TAYLOR FRITZ ON HIS ABILITY TO PLAY THROUGH INJURY - “I just feel that if I’m not injured to the point that I can’t walk out on court that I feel like I can play. It’s probably once of my best assets and biggest weaknesses is how stubborn I am and how I hate to pull out of tournaments and not play.”

MAXIME CRESSY ON MEDITATION – “When I was 18 years old a coach introduced me to it because he knew I had some anger or some issues with emotions and hard to control and that’s when I got introduced to the meditation world and it changed my life.”

JACK DRAPER ON PLAYING NOVAK DJOKOVIC AT WIMBLEDON 2021 – “That experience gave me a lot of different lessons and he exposed a lot of areas in my game, probably like he should do. He’s number one in the world, but that gave me a lot of things to work on and improve in the coming months and I think this year I’ve been able to put that into action, stay injury-free and the year is going pretty quick.”

STEFANOS TSITSIPAS ON HIS RELATIVE LACK OF GRASS COURT TENNIS – “I was thinking about it recently that I haven’t played that much, but it probably just shows how new I am to the Tour. We all know the grass season is not a very long season, In my opinion it should be longer, but absolutely I haven’t played that much and I’m looking forward to playing on it as much as I can.”

STEFANOS TSITSIPAS ON HIS ADIDAS SHOE – “My face is on the shoe, it is really cool. I use to wear Stan Smith shoes as a young kid and back in the day when I used to buy them I would never really think that in a thousand years I would be competing with him now or not even really competing, but trying to take over.”

DENIS SHAPOVALOV ON HIS RUN TO THE 2021 WIMBLEDON SEMI-FINALS – “I think everything just kind of clicked during this part of the season for me last year and I do think the grass really suits me and I think for a lefty with a lot of firepower it’s a difficult surface to play against me on, so it definitely adds to my game to play on this surface.”

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LINDSAY DAVENPORT WIMBLEDON MEMORIES – “The first time I went there I of course lost in the qualies and I remember I was pretty young, like 15 or 16 and I remember crying and then the next year I got into the main draw and I’ll never forget this, I was up 6-2, 5-1 and I couldn’t believe I was about to win a match and I ended up winning 10-8 in the third. You can’t put into words why it makes you feel like that.”

TIM HENMAN WIMBLEDON MEMORIES – “[In] 1997 I was playing Paul Haarhuis in the third round and when we came on court you know the Centre Court was absolutely packed and every shot I hit in the warm-up the crowd cheered and every shot he hit the crowd booed an in terms of atmosphere that was the best atmosphere I ever played in.”

DANI VALLVERDU ON THE ATP COACHING TRIAL – “It will be a soft approach but I think it’s the first step to introduce this coaching rule and I think it was well supported by the players and I think it’s important for the coaches to know that, so it was a joint decision between the coaches pushing for it and the players being quite open that it was something important to get done.”

- Podcast presented by Chris Bowers and Candy Reid
- Interviews by Chris Bowers, Candy Reid, Richard Connelly & Ursin Caderas
- Tim Henman and Lindsey Davenport feature by Tennis United