By Chris Oddo | @TheFanChild | Thursdsay August 18, 2022
The ATP’s new coaching regulations have inspired a lot of different opinions from players on tour. The tour now allows coaching from the box during matches, with the decision to continue the trial through the US Open and all the way to the end of the season.
The trial started on July 11, and Taylor Fritz says it hasn’t changed a thing for him. On Wednesday in Cincinnati he called the rule “dumb.”
“I haven’t talked to Mike [Russell] and he hasn’t talked to me one time since the coaching has become a thing. It’s a dumb rule,” he said. When asked to elaborate Fritz said that tennis is, in his mind, an individual sport – a view shared by many peers and pundits.
Tennis is an individual sport,” he said. “Why are we making it not an individual sport? A huge part of tennis is, in my mind, like as tennis is as much mental as it is physical, and a big part of it is you need to be figuring it out on the court for yourself. You need to be the one figuring it out.
“I think it’s ridiculous that you can be mentally not there, not good analytically, not good at kind of working through things and coming up with strategies, and you can have someone tell you what to do. I hate it.”
Aiming for Top-5
Fritz has an opportunity to make his Top-10 debut after Cincinnati, if he can get past Daniil Medvedev in teh quarterfinals on Friday.
The American, currently ranked at 13, one spot shy of his career-high 12, says he is looking past that and aiming for the Top-5.
“It’s a huge goal,” he said of the Top-10 on Wednesday, when asked. “Just growing up as a kid, being a top-10 player in the world, it’s always something you kind of dream of. It’s still a big goal, but I think sometimes when you get really close to reaching these goals, it almost makes you, like, I guess, tighten up a little bit. We have almost re-evaluated. We said, Okay, we are not thinking about top 10 anymore. We are thinking of top 5 now.
“That’s just the correct — with that mindset, it will just make it easier to make it into the top 10, I feel.”
The top-ranked American is 35-13 on the season, and has a shot of qualifying for the ATP’s year-end championships in Turin for the first time.
He is currently 10th in the race.
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