Australian Open 2025: There really isn’t much time in the offseason for tennis players

If it feels like 2025 starts right after the end of the 2024 professional tennis year, that’s because that’s exactly what happens in a sport where the offseason doesn’t really give players much time to “off.”

In fact, for tennis, 2025 began when the calendar still read 2024.

“I definitely want the offseason to be longer, 100%,” said 2023 US Open champion Coco Gough, who began her “year” by helping the American team to the United Cup title in Sydney, more than a week after the Dec. 27 competition. has been “But that’s it.”

When the Australian Open begins in Melbourne, players will tune up by playing in various events that follow practice periods and work out in the gym that have been longer than others.

“I wouldn’t say there’s even an offseason,” said 2021 Wimbledon semifinalist Denis Shapovalov. “The season never ends.”

For the record, last season officially and finally ended on December 22, when Brazil’s Joao Fonseca won the ATP Next Gen Final in Saudi Arabia. She returned to the court in December for the Challenger Tour stop in Canberra, Australia – which she also won.

The golf season is similar, running essentially non-stop without the multiple months off offered by team sports.

“For a long time, we (are) struggling to have a long offseason. To stay healthy… you need at least a two month offseason. So it would be great to finish a little earlier,” said Conchita Martinez, a former player who won the 1994 Wimbledon championships and now coaches Russian teenager Mira Andreeva.

“For the health of the tour, for the health of the players,” Martinez said, “maybe (the season) should be a little shorter.”

This, to be sure, is not a new concern.

Yet nothing seems to have changed. If anything, the problem is becoming more pronounced.

And in Martinez’s words, the first week of the season included two singles finals in which one player withdrew — Naomi Osaka in Auckland, New Zealand, and Reilly Opelka in Brisbane, Australia — over injury concerns (which they probably wanted too) with the year’s first Grand Slam tournament on the horizon. Make sure not to press).

That’s why, as much as possible, athletes try to find some time before they’re ready to ramp up for what’s coming.

“I had a week and a half that I didn’t touch a tennis racket. I just threw it in my room. I didn’t want to see it anymore,” joked four-time major champion Carlos Alcaraz. “It was really helpful to disconnect a little bit.”

They say they see the period between seasons, however brief, as an opportunity to combine rest and relaxation — the Maldives is a popular vacation spot, as a look at the players’ social media shows — with training and preparation, trying to improve in some ways. With a view to doing

“You take a break. But you have to get back on the court and in the gym to get ready for Australia,” said Jasmine Paolini, runner-up at the French Open and Wimbledon in 2024. “You have to practice as soon as you can, but there’s not a lot of time, so you have to figure out how to schedule things.”

Ben Shelton, a big server who was a quarterfinalist at the Australian Open and US Open two years ago, has spent time in his comeback game this offseason. He was representing the United States at the Davis Cup in Spain in late November, then played an exhibition match at Madison Square Garden in early December before heading to his new home, Orlando, Florida, to prepare for January.

Unlike many players, he skipped any competition in the first week of 2025, instead entering an event in Auckland this week before heading to Melbourne.

Shelton explains the mindset like this: “Oh, I’m on six weeks off; I’m not really ‘match tough’ now.

Some fans wonder why he and others choose to participate in exhibitions, but players say they don’t take the same toll as later-in-the-day tournaments or even daily Slam events. It’s hard to argue with anyone choosing to make a little extra money.

And players make the case that no matter how much they can switch off in November or December, part of the problem is that they’re not very likely to do so in other months.

“Ideally we would have had a bit more time. It’s such a short turnaround… after such a long season. There are not enough days to recover,” said Alexei Popyrin, an Australian who upset Novak Djokovic at last year’s US Open. “Taking time to rest your body can hinder preparation, but at the end of the day, your body needs to be ready. The schedule is very busy throughout the year.”