ATP Tour

Ben Shelton: 'He believes he should be with the best'

Kenny Thorne, the men’s tennis head coach at Georgia Institute of Technology, vividly remembers a nine-year-old Ben Shelton during he school’s summer tennis camp, long before he was a multi-time US Open semi-finalist and preparing for his chance Friday against Frances Tiafoe to make his first major final at Flushing Meadows.

“You heard him all the way down the courts,” Thorne told ATPTour.com. “Four, five, six courts. Most of the nine-year-old kids are kind of shy, and just trying to fit in. Ben was trying to help his team win at age nine, playing with 15, 16, 17 year olds. He brought the energy then, so it was just in his DNA.”

Sound familiar? The lefty loves bringing the crowd into matches today, and has always been passionate on court, even back in some of his earliest days in the sport.

Thorne grew up in the juniors in Alabama with Bryan Shelton, Ben’s father. They competed together at Georgia Tech and even played some doubles on the ATP Tour, facing Andre Agassi and John McEnroe at the ATP Masters 1000 event in Toronto in 1992. Eventually, Thorne took the reins of the men’s team at his alma mater, while Shelton coached the women’s team.

The pair’s families became quite close, too. Ben and Thorne’s son, Daniel, homeschooled during preschool together.

“My wife and Lisa [Shelton] alternated, taking them both over to their houses. So he was just always around,” Thorne said of Ben. “Him and [Ben’s sister] Emma were always around. It was both of them. Bryan and Lisa do such a great job raising their kids just to be respectful, and he was one of the guys I could always send my kids over to, and they came back better.”

While the Shelton family moved to Florida in 2012 when Bryan became head coach of the men’s team at the University of Florida, few know the family as well as Thorne to understand why the father and son work so well as a coach-player tandem.

“I think they complement each other extremely well. Bryan doesn't try to make Ben Bryan, and I think Bryan knows Ben. We all know our kids, but he seems to know what Ben's going to do before he does it, and kind of reads that,” Thorne said. “Ben's independent, he does his own thing. But he understands that Bryan really studies the game and knows the game, so I think there's just kind of mutual respect there. I think Bryan sees something special in Ben.”

^{Thorne at Shelton's win against Alcaraz. Photo: AFP/Getty Images}

Although Shelton and Thorne were no longer coaching at the same institution when Ben was a student-athlete at the University of Florida, under his father’s tutelage, Thorne was across the lefty’s progress. Thorne explained that if you watch Shelton closely enough, you will see that every few months, whether the seven-time ATP Tour titlist has earned a notable result or not, “the progressions are amazing”.

“They're never hanging onto something… That's just how Bryan's mind works. He’s [thinking], ‘What can we improve?’ I mean, he was thinking that all through college with Ben. ‘Hey, we need to improve this’. Ben’s out there beating some pretty darn good players. I think everybody around him is going, ‘Oh, it looks pretty darn good to me’,” Thorne said. “And Bryan is like, ‘Yeah, he’s not hitting his kick serve out wide on this well enough’. He's just super focused on what he needs to develop more of.

“And Ben is kind of similar. He's always the one wanting to go out and practise a little more, wanting to hit a few more balls, wanting to kind of fix things and go. I think sometimes results won't show it, but there's always improvements that they're making. It's constant.”

A lot of discussion about Shelton’s game is in regards to his serve. But according to Thorne, “he is one of the best competitors I’ve seen”.

“He can go out and lose matches and have a tough time. I remember there was a phase where he was losing for a while, and all of a sudden he just had a big run, and it might have been at the US Open a couple years back,” Thorne said. “But he was just kind of surprised that he wasn’t winning. He was like, ‘It's going to come. It's going to come, it's going to come’. And that's something really hard to teach. He believes he should be with the best.”

That proved the case in the early hours of Wednesday morning, when Shelton battled deep into the fifth set with defending champion Carlos Alcaraz. Thorne always supports Shelton when he can, and that was the case during the American’s memorable quarter-final victory.

The Georgia Tech coach was in Shelton’s box until the very end, at 3:33 a.m. Thorne did not stay to see Ben after the match because he and his wife needed to return to Manhattan to pick up their bags and turn right around to head to the airport for a flight around 7 a.m. But while in a car later that day, he reflected on the moment.

“We’ve journeyed with the family enough to know that last night, it was special. But we knew — in full, full respect to Carlos and what he's done and how he does it… I think everybody respects that — but I knew Ben was not going to be happy just playing a good battle, a long match, and a tough one,” Thorne said. “You could just tell that he's done that. He's already been there. So to see him actually come through and finish it off was very special.”