Welcome back to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where The Athletic will explain the stories behind the stories from the past week on court.

This week, why even the best all-court and baseline players can’t run from the serve, a line-holding session on the ATP Tour, the return of a bona fide star and some tennis politics.

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What can Iga Świątek learn from Carlos Alcaraz?

After Elena Rybakina’s serve supremacy decided her Australian Open quarterfinal win over Iga Świątek, the Polish world No. 2 had another rough day during her uneven 2-6, 6-4, 7-5 loss to Maria Sakkari in the Qatar Open quarterfinals Thursday.

As Świątek and coach Wim Fissette groove in the controlled baseline aggression and patience that she wants to define her play, her serve’s ineffectiveness at earning free points is becoming more of a limiting factor on the court. There is only so much any player can do when their serve is unable to offer a release valve — even a generational talent like Świątek, who was broken five times across the second and third sets by Sakkari.

Starting so many rallies from neutral or defensive positions on both serve and return compounds Świątek’s need to win cheap points in other ways, which leads to more baseline errors as she attempts to earn those easier wins.

A reference point to understand how even the current best in the world can only do so much with serve limitations might be the strides Carlos Alcaraz has made over the past year. Before Alcaraz started to make big improvements to the shot last summer, he was more vulnerable to the kind of defeats Świątek has been suffering of late. Ones where there isn’t much in it, but the match becomes an arm wrestle because even successful holds of serve are a struggle. Though against Sakkari, it was the excessive variance in Świątek’s serve reliability that mattered. Of her 10 holds, four were to love.

Świątek knows this, and said after losing to Rybakina in Melbourne that she will continue to make tweaks to her serve, if not a wholesale change to a motion which is less fluid than most and so has more places at which it can change slightly from point to point and thus become less reliable.

The 24-year-old even said she would take the extreme measure of skipping WTA 1000 events (the rung below the Slams) to work on her game — a pledge she has made good on by skipping this week’s Dubai Duty Free Championships.

“There’s some stuff on the serve that I want to change, and I already changed that in the pre-season, but then matches come and you don’t have that much time to think about this. You don’t want to think about these kind of details when you play,” she said in her news conference in Melbourne.

“So then it comes back to the old patterns. So yeah, I’ll focus on that … I see Carlos, for example, changing his serve every year. For me, it’s one little thing takes a much longer time.”

Last week will have served as a reminder to Świątek that she can’t take too much longer to fix an issue that is holding her back and leaves her much closer, in points terms, to the world No. 3 Rybakina than the No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka — another player who came through even more serious issues with her serve earlier in her career.

— Charlie Eccleshare

How did the best of the rest on the ATP Tour hold their positions?

Come the end of this week’s ATP tournaments, one thing held steady across three finals and two continents: the best players in each field went all the way to the end. At the Dallas Open, the Rotterdam Open in the Netherlands and the Argentina Open in Buenos Aires, the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds faced off in the championship match.

On a tour whose biggest prizes are so dominated by world No. 1 Alcaraz and world No. 2 Jannik Sinner, it is vital for those competing below them to deliver when those two are absent.

In Dallas, No. 1 seed Taylor Fritz and No. 2 seed Ben Shelton played out a seesawing final. Both players came through serious jeopardy to reach it: Fritz was two points from defeat in a deciding tiebreak during his quarterfinal against compatriot Sebastian Korda, while Shelton had to save a break point at 5-5 in the third set of his semifinal against defending champion Denis Shapovalov of Canada. Like Fritz against Korda, Shelton had to win a third-set tiebreak to take the match; he came from a set down to win in his quarterfinal and semifinal.

When he and Fritz met, Shelton came from a set down for a third time, and saved three championship points on his own serve when Fritz was leading 5-4 in the third, before breaking Fritz in the very next game and serving out the title 3-6, 6-3, 7-5.

The win makes Shelton the first American man since Andy Roddick to win three or more titles above the ATP 250 level — this ATP 500, the Canadian Open ATP Masters 1000 in 2025, and the ATP 500 Japan Open in 2023. The high-variance nature of his wins at the Dallas Open, especially given that he sits at 46th for break frequency in the top 50, can be taken two ways: He produces his best play on the biggest return points; he needs to more reliably break serve to make matches less of a flip.

Fritz played despite managing knee tendonitis and an oblique injury, and Shelton said in his on-court speech that “what you’ve done this year, dealing with adversity, fighting through injuries, nags here and there … The competitor that you are the work that your team does — you’re an inspiration. I think every kid at home should watch how hard you compete day in, day out when you’re not feeling 100 percent.”

During a news conference before the final, Fritz had said that some of his choices to play through injury in 2025 had been subject to “valid” criticism.

“There’s been times for sure when I’ve made the wrong call with it. The main concern for a long term has been my knee — it’s not something that gets better with rest … You need to just work through it. Not necessarily play through it, but if I wasn’t playing I’d be doing all the same rehab.”

Shelton was the only No. 2 seed to take home the trophy: Australia’s Alex de Minaur beat Canada’s Félix Auger-Aliassime 6-3, 6-2 to win the Rotterdam Open (500) in his third final appearance there, while, to the delight of his home fans, Francisco Cerúndolo beat Italy’s Luciano Darderi 6-4, 6-2 to win the Argentina Open (250) at the first time of asking.

— James Hansen

Positive signs for a returning star?

The Qatar Open’s last four was much less chalky than this week’s ATP tournaments, but the event also offered a possible reset for one of the WTA Tour’s bona fide stars: Zheng Qinwen.

Zheng’s return from an elbow injury in her playing arm should make an already exciting group of players at the top of the rankings even more intriguing, if she can rediscover the form that she displayed before that injury.

Her Qatar Open campaign was her first tournament since September, and the 23-year-old won two rounds before pushing the tour’s in-form player, Rybakina, all the way in a tight last-16 match. It was 2024 that showed how much of a factor Zheng might be, in which she reached the Australian Open final and won women’s singles gold at the Paris Olympic Games, beating Świątek, the overwhelming favorite, on her favorite court in the semifinals.

Zheng, currently ranked No. 23, can beat anyone — and her serve, sometimes deadly, sometimes erratic, looked to be smoother and more reliable in the three matches she played last week, especially a three-set win over Sofia Kenin in which Zheng hit 20 aces.

“I don’t pray for winning matches. I just prayed for a normal elbow,” she said of her rehabilitation process after beating Kenin.

With a massive following in China and mega commercial appeal as a result, Zheng receives a huge amount of attention wherever she plays. Her tennis merited the hype for a year and a half, and if she can get back to that kind of level, then the WTA Tour will be an even more interesting place.

— Charlie Eccleshare

A test for a young talent’s mentality?

At just 18, Mirra Andreeva is miles ahead of the curve by any conceivable tennis metric. She’s the world No. 7, a two-time WTA 1000 champion and a major semifinalist.

Since reaching the French Open last four almost two years ago, Andreeva hasn’t really gotten close to winning a first major, which is understandable for someone so young. What is, on the face of it, more surprising is that since winning those two WTA 1000 titles, at last year’s Dubai Tennis Championships and BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, Andreeva has appeared to be going backwards.

At last year’s French Open, Andreeva unraveled in front of a hostile home crowd from 5-3 up in the first set and 3-0 up in the second against world No. 361 Loïs Boisson, ultimately losing 7-6(6), 6-3. She smashed a ball into the upper tiers of Court Philippe-Chatrier after missing a routine volley during the second set, and asked for one of her team members to leave the court.

Since then, she has endured a number of similarly distressing defeats since, at times in tears during games and changeovers. The worst of them was a Wuhan Open defeat to Laura Siegemund in China last October, when Andreeva was openly weeping on court. During a three-set, last-16 defeat to Victoria Mboko at the Doha Open, similar flare-ups occurred twice down the stretch.

As Andreeva heads into the next four weeks of tennis, she has 2,000 points and two titles to defend. The pressure of expectation can be great — so too the pressure that progress on court and off it should be linear when it so often is not.

— Charlie Eccleshare

What is the future of February’s ATP Tour events?

February in men’s tennis is expected to look very different in a couple of years, with the upcoming ATP Masters 1000 event in Saudi Arabia likely to be slotted into the calendar from 2028.

The ATP is still working on what it calls “calendar optimization” for 2028, and the schedule is not expected to be announced until early next year.

But over the weekend, with decisions to be made about how the calendar is rejigged, tour chairman Andrea Gaudenzi was in Buenos Aires for the conclusion of the Argentina Open. The South American swing is hugely popular with fans and many players, and so any change there will be keenly felt — as with the Rio de Janeiro Open, which begins this week, and the Chile Open in Santiago that ends the month.

Gaudenzi has previously expressed a desire for concurrent swings of tournaments, one in South America and one in West Asia, but that would come with player-attraction concerns for the South American events. They are 250-level (Argentina Open, Chile Open) and 500-level (Rio de Janeiro Open), while the new Saudi Arabian tournament is 1,000-level and will have considerably more prize-money potential.

ATP Tour chief executive Eno Polo, meanwhile, was in Dallas for the Dallas Open last week, before heading to Doha, where this week’s Qatar Open is staged.

Tour chiefs frequently attend events to get a feel for them and understand what makes them tick, with Polo making regular trips since his appointment in September as he acclimatizes to his new role.

Gaudenzi’s presence in Argentina garnered plenty of attention, as the tennis world waits to see how the ATP manages Saudi Arabia’s entry onto the tour, and which events will have to be adjusted as a result.

— Charlie Eccleshare

Shot of the week

Taylor Fritz breaking out the improvisational part of his game to nick a point against compatriot Marcos Giron:

🏆 The winners of the week

🎾 ATP: 

🏆 Alex de Minaur (1) def. Félix Auger-Aliassime (2) 6-3, 6-2 to win the Rotterdam Open (500) in Rotterdam, Netherlands. It is his 11th ATP title.

🏆 Ben Shelton (2) def. Taylor Fritz (1) 3-6, 6-3, 7-5 to win the Dallas Open (500) in Dallas. It is his fourth ATP title.

🏆 Francisco Cerúndolo (1) def. Luciano Darderi (2) 6-4, 6-2 to win the Argentina Open (250) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is his fourth ATP title.

🎾 WTA:

🏆 Karolína Muchová (14) def. Victoria Mboko (10) 6-4, 7-5 to win the Qatar Open (1,000) in Doha, Qatar. It is her first WTA 1000 title.

📈📉 On the rise / Down the line

📈 Victoria Mboko enters the top 10 for the first time, moving up three places from No. 13 to No. 10, a career-high ranking.

📈 Alex de Minaur returns to his career high of world No. 6, moving up two places from No. 8.

📈 Maria Sakkari reenters the top 40 after rising 18 spots from No. 52 to No. 34.

📈 Marin Čilić ascends 18 spots from No. 61 to No. 43.

📉 João Fonseca falls five places from No. 33 to No. 38 after losing in the opening match of his Argentina Open title defense.

📉 Amanda Anisimova drops two places from No. 4 to No. 6 after losing in the opening match of her Qatar Open title defense.

📉 Márton Fucsovics leaves the top 50, falling 12 places from No. 49 to No. 61.

📉 Rebecca Šramková leaves the top 100, falling 21 places from No. 82 to No. 103.

📅 Coming up

🎾 ATP 

📍Doha, Qatar: Qatar Open (500) featuring Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, Alexander Bublik, Arthur Fils.

📍Rio de Janeiro: Rio de Janeiro Open (500) featuring João Fonseca, Francisco Cerúndolo, Gaël Monfils, Matteo Berrettini.

📍Delray Beach, Florida: Delray Beach Open (250) featuring Taylor Fritz, Casper Ruud, Tommy Paul, Valentin Vacherot.

📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.: Tennis Channel 💻 Tennis TV

🎾 WTA

📍Dubai, United Arab Emirates: Dubai Tennis Championships (1,000) featuring Elena Rybakina, Coco Gauff, Amanda Anisimova, Alex Eala.

📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.: Tennis Channel

Tell us what you noticed this week in the comments below as the men’s and women’s tours continue.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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