Frances Tiafoe finished last season looking for a fresh start. It had been a decade since he turned pro, and despite flashes of brilliance and occasionally deep tournament runs, he’d found himself stalling and skidding through 2025. So he overhauled his approach. Tiafoe skipped most of the Asian and European competitions that round out the annual tennis calendar. He used the autumn to find a new coach and start a new practice regimen. And rather than relocating somewhere new or heading somewhere warm, Tiafoe instead went home to Maryland, training for roughly six weeks at the facility where he discovered the sport as a child in College Park, the Junior Tennis Champions Center.
He sometimes brought a very recognizable hitting partner.
Ben Shelton also spent time in the D.C. area this offseason. He is dating Washington Spirit star Trinity Rodman. Over the last few years on the ATP Tour, the 23-year-old Shelton and 28-year-old Tiafoe have been competitors, but they have grown into a friendship, too. It only made sense that, on multiple occasions, Shelton joined Tiafoe at JTCC.
The two elite talents mixed in with the ordinary hum of the surrounding courts. “It’s a treat to have two players of that level, practicing in front of all of our kids and members,” says JTCC CEO Martin Blackman. “It was really special.”
Trending
The pair will play again this weekend on a somewhat bigger stage.
Friday night, Tiafoe and Shelton will meet in the U.S. Open semifinals. It will be their third time playing at the tournament in the last four years. (Shelton won in the quarterfinals in 2023; Tiafoe got revenge in the third round in 2024.) Each player is seeking his first Grand Slam final and, by extension, a chance to become the first American man to win a major since Andy Roddick in 2003. There will be a watch party, naturally, at JTCC.
Tiafoe and Shelton hit together at the facility at least three times as they prepped for this season, Blackman says. (JTCC posted a video of one such joint training session last November.) It was part of an unusually intense offseason at the facility for Tiafoe.
His relationship with the place has always been special. Nearly every match of his includes some commentary about his origin story and, in turn, his connection with JTCC: When he was a toddler, his father worked on the labor crew that built the facility, and that construction job became a maintenance role after the courts opened. From a young age, Tiafoe was surrounded by tennis, growing up around the facility and taking advantage of every opportunity he could find there. The son of Sierra Leonean immigrants became a prodigy and then a pro.
Like many tennis players, he established a base in Florida, where he generally spends his winters. But last offseason, searching for a way to shake up his career, Tiafoe decided that most of his training should happen back home in Maryland.
For years, Tiafoe had seemed perpetually on the verge of a breakthrough, always talented but never quite consistent. A strong run through 2023 and ’24 had faded into a lackluster 2025. He decided that something had to change. Tiafoe brought on a new coach, Mark Kovacs, with a focus on data and sports science.
“We all know he could play tennis at a high level,” Kovacs told the ATP Tour’s website in January. “Now it’s about, ‘Can he take care of the little details on a daily basis?’” That meant everything from his fitness to his serve mechanics to his arrival time at the facility. (Kovacs is a stickler for punctuality.) They refined his diet and maximized his sleep. And on the same courts where he learned the game as a kid, Tiafoe worked to unlock a new level of performance as an adult.
“It was every day,” says Blackman, who originally worked at JTCC when Tiafoe was in elementary school and returned to run the center last year. “I mean, day in and day out.”
This was a striking change in approach for Tiafoe. It was immediately obvious in some ways: He lost 17 pounds. That kind of work does not always translate directly to better results on the court. Yet here it did. Tiafoe was in better shape, yes, but he was also more clear-minded about what he was chasing and it would ask of him.
“There’s a lot of things I’ve changed,” Tiafoe said at the French Open in May. “Just having a lot of conversations, trying to be real, man. What are you really trying to do? What are you trying to get out of it? You know, just stop hiding behind your talent, stop hiding behind the gift. … A lot of times you can get away with stuff because you’re so gifted. But use the gift the right way, and, you know, squeeze a lemon and see what you can get out of it.”
Tiafoe began the season ranked No. 32. He now sits higher than ever at No. 8. He won his first ATP 500 trophy at the Terra Wortmann Open in June, and for just the second time in his career, has made it to at least the third round of all four Grand Slams. But his best performance of all has come over the last two weeks at the U.S. Open.
It has always been his favorite major — on home soil, in front of a traditionally loud, rambunctious crowd that matches his energy — and he has played like it.
Tiafoe cruised into the quarterfinals. He then dropped the first two sets to Alex Michelsen. It was a match that he might have easily lost a year ago — a match that nearly anyone would have lost at that point. Yet it was not a match that Tiafoe lost in 2026. He gutted out a remarkable comeback, winning 5-7, 3-6, 7-5, 6-3, 7-6 (6), and promptly offered a touching display of sportsmanship by interrupting his own celebration to embrace a distraught Michelsen. That good cheer has always been a signature of his. But that particular brand of gritty, persistent tennis represented something new.
“The match against Michelsen, I think, is almost kind of the epitome of the difference in him now,” Blackman says. “He knows that as long as he’s in the match, he’s got a chance, because he’s always making adjustments, he’s fit enough to go the distance, and he’s got the belief that he can stand on the work that he did.”
Back at JTCC, where so much of that work took place, they were all watching. And they’ll be watching again Friday night, as a familiar pairing faces off somewhere different.
Author
