MELBOURNE, Australia — Over the course of seven hours on Friday afternoon, the Australian Open was transformed into America’s tennis trout farm.
When watching a singles match, it was nearly impossible to see the red, white and blue flags displayed on the scoreboard. Two men in their early 20s and a teenager who looks younger than 19 have made it through the men’s bracket and are entering their second week. .
Have any of the two Orange County boys, Learner Tien and Alex Michelsen, advanced to the round of 16?
They didn’t.
“I lost a set in the first qualifying round and took a break,” said Tien, a teenager in the group, after beating France’s Corentin Moutet in three sets. “It’s week two now and it’s kind of crazy,” he added.
Michelsen arrived first, dropping No. 19 seed Karen Khachanov in three sets.
The American women’s victory had it all, with Emma Navarro capping off her second week with three straight three-set wins to start the day. Madison Keys got there to close out the night, beating out friend, compatriot and Aussie crowd favorite Danielle Collins.
It all seemed a little less surprising. Keys and Navarro have been there before, as has Coco Gauff. Tommy Paul’s best Grand Slam performance came when he reached the 2022 semi-finals in Australia, where he joined Gaff, Keys and Navarro with a routine win over Roberto Cabayes Baena the day before. Paul and Gauff further boosted the American momentum with fourth-round wins over Alexander Davidovich Fokina and Belinda Bencic.
Tien, 19, and Michelson, 20, who will try to liven things up in Melbourne on Monday, are showing the opposite trend. Michelsen has past form. He reached the third round in Melbourne last year and has twice won first round at the US Open in the last two years. matches.
Tien, a two-time national junior champion, had played two Grand Slam main draw draws before this week, losing in four sets to Arthur Fils at the 2024 US Open and three sets to Tiafoe the year before. The third time was the charm. He defeated Camilo Ugo Carabelli of Argentina in five sets.
The draw then earned him two matches against his arch-rivals on the ATP Tour, which was less a baptism of fire and more a surprising journey into the dark arts of tennis with twisting shots, seductive spins and the big boys. Tien took on fifth seed Daniil Medvedev in five sets and nearly five hours in a match that ended shortly before dawn. Then, in the second set, Moutet came on and reminded Tien that he still needed to win the third set. Moutet played at some points as if he was hobbled by a hip injury and at others as if he was crawling across the court at top speed. It’s an exciting time for Grand Slam newbies.
“I had no idea what was happening to him,” Tien said at the press conference, with one foot still in the washing machine.
Add in Ben Shelton’s four-set win over Italian Lorenzo Musetti, who beat him 2-2, and you get some surprising statistics. This is the first Grand Slam since 1993 to feature three American men under the age of 23 in the second week. Thien and Michelson are also the first pair of U.S. men under 20 to reach the third round of a Grand Slam since the 2003 U.S. Open (Andy Roddick and Michelson’s coach, Robbie Ginepri).
Not too far behind in the fourth round were America’s two most recent major finalists, Taylor Fritz and Jessica Pegula. Gael Monfils produced a perfect fourth set to knock out Fritz. Olga Danilovic produced two identical cars to eliminate Pegula.
Yeah, it’s a little weird. But maybe there is an explanation.
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In mid-November, Michelsen and Tien clashed. The two best friends, who play Fortnite together in their free time and have trained at the same Orange County Tennis Academy for the past four years, have just completed a long season. They had the usual menu of sore joints from hitting too many balls for too long.
They didn’t boot the console.
“They basically put down the rackets for two weeks and went to work,” Rodney Marshall, a Southern California tennis fitness expert who has been working with Michelson for the past year, said in an interview Saturday in Los Angeles.
Everyone calls Marshall ‘Rocket’. He is one of the sports advisory experts that American tennis players have trusted for 15 years to help them become faster, stronger and more durable.
Marshall, Michelsen and Tien have been working together twice a day, six days a week, at an academy in California and on the sands of Aliso Beach, California, where they have been training together for the past four years.
They only had a small window of opportunity and had to figure out what kind of incremental profits they could make. They wanted to strengthen their lower body and fine-tune their movements so they could get in and out of all corners of the court faster. This is an essential skill these days.
Thien, who missed the first three months of the season with broken ribs, needed more leverage on his left leg (the back leg of his forehand) to maximize the power he can exert at his 180 cm (5 feet 11 inches) height. frame. At 6-foot-5, Mickelson had to get better at lowering his center of gravity and finding strength in a squat position.
Life has become an endless series of isometrics and plyometrics. Isometrics (holding long stretching positions) strengthen muscles and tendons. Plyometrics (jumping) increases explosiveness.
Every Saturday they went to the beach and ran a sprint. Marshall took the football and sent it on a passing route across the sand, with one playing wide receiver and the other playing cornerback.
“It was almost like cramming,” he said of Tien and Michelsen. “They accepted the pain wholeheartedly.” If this line sounds familiar, there’s a reason why. Four-time Grand Slam champion Carlos Alcaraz, 21, admitted he found “joy in pain” in his French Open title last June.
It wasn’t long before Tien showed some more power when hitting tennis balls down the line. Michelsen twisted himself to the floor and told Marshall he could stay there all day. “I love it here,” he exclaimed.
“It’s a constant battle every day,” Michelsen said in an interview after his third-round victory over Khachanov, his second victory over a seed in six days.
“I look at Marin Cilic. He was about 6-6 and was always too low. I’ve been trying to recreate that.”
Alex Michelsen’s explosiveness on the pitch has been key to his performance in Melbourne. (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)
On the other side of the country, in Florida, Paul was going through his own fitness block with Fritz, with the latter heading to Southern California for tennis training. Frances Tiafoe, Reilly Opelka, Jacob Fearnley and many other experts were with Paul in Florida.
“It’s a good group,” said Paul, who often talks about the NFL and NBA with Michelson in the locker room. “He’s a really good competitor,” he said of Michelsen.
Paul said in an interview Friday that he is determined to play on his own terms in 2025. He wants to move other people around this season, but he doesn’t want to be the guy who moves too much. That always seems to happen when he met Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner last year. His fast-paced front-foot tennis can hurt them for a while. He defeated Alcaraz at Wimbledon and went 4-1 against Sinner at the US Open. But they pushed him back to the baseline and took him out of the game.
“Carlos moves incredibly well when he needs to, but when you watch him when he’s playing his best tennis, he seems to dictate,” Paul said.
Shelton was doing his thing in Orlando. He was trying to find a way to transition from a below-average returner to someone who could get free points on his serve, while also preventing others from getting free points on his serve.
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From dawn on Friday, when Thien defeated Medvedev in a match that ended at 2:56 a.m., to sunset on Saturday, when Shelton defeated Musetti in a fourth-set tiebreaker, the under-23 trio showed that their training was excellent. It was worth it.
Tien returned to the hotel after 4am. He ate cold, stale pizza and didn’t fall asleep until just before 7 a.m. We slept in until about 1:30pm and then went back to Melbourne Park and basically hit tennis balls. I stood still for 45 minutes and had 5 hours of massage and physical therapy.
He didn’t fall asleep until 11 p.m. “It was absolutely necessary,” he said.
He then filleted Moutet and did to the Frenchman what Moutet had done to many others over the years, minus the dark arts of delay and distraction.
“Great effort from the guy today,” Tien’s coach, Eric Diaz, wrote in a text message. “I feel unwell. The mental rebound is also impressive.”
Learner Tien’s court skills tangled his opponents. (Daniel Crockett/AFP via Getty Images)
Shelton also had some rebounds. He went on to watch two losses against 16th seed Musetti, reliving the Italian rolling a series of backhand passing shots down the line. Tied at 5-5 in the fourth set tiebreak, Shelton hit a terrible drop shot that deflected Musetti’s devastating backhand. The point seemed lost, but Shelton knew what to expect. He finished the game by covering the line and poking a volley into the open court.
He spent the afternoon watching other games, especially Michelsen’s.
“Me and Alex, it’s a boy,” Shelton said at a press conference.
“I texted him and said dog after every game because it’s true he won. He is a dog. He will soon be at the top.”
With Shelton watching, Michelsen scored three points in the second-set tiebreak, effectively sealing his victory over Khachanov. All of them are rooted in off-season training blocks. He won his first with a curved 108 mph second serve, a product of leg strength and jumping. He took his second after sprinting for the ball off the tramline and swinging a forehand down the line. He won his third with his bread and butter, a powerful backhand down the line, with a little extra pop from every medicine ball thrown by Marshall and Tien.
In the case of Tien, Shelton can see a kindred spirit in his fellow left-hander, despite their diametrically opposed styles. Tien’s game is about changing speeds, floating the ball deep into the backcourt, and then attacking suddenly. His tennis is nothing like Shelton’s frontal assault, but Tien is suddenly breaking through here two years after Shelton did it on the same court.
“It’s not a bad place to make a breakthrough,” Shelton said. “In addition to all the athletes who have already made it to the top in the United States, there are many more to come. It’s really starting to reveal itself.”
Indeed it is. Trout farms, which are much easier to create in a wealthy country with a population of more than 300 million, are doing what they are supposed to do. The singles draw featured 33 Americans, more than any other country. Two safe harbors have already been secured and potentially four more are scheduled as the tournament enters the quarter-finals.
Now comes the hard part. Cut the tape at the finish line like Gauff did 16 months ago in New York. There is no need for trout farms. I need unicorns, but I don’t have a farm that can produce them.
(Top photo: Peter Staples/ATP Tour)
