With the Next Gen ATP Finals underway, tennis fans have an opportunity to appreciate the rising stars on tour. Czech youngster Jakub Mensik has been a standout this season, and American colleague Christopher Eubanks highlighted Mensik's underrated serve.
Eight of the best young players under 22 on the ATP Tour compete at the end of the season at at the Next Gen ATP Finals, which is being hosted in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia this year. The list includes the likes of Frenchman Arthur Fils, who has already won a main draw title this year, and China's Juncheng Shang, who finished runner-up at his home event a few months ago.
On the latest episode of the Tennis Channel Live Podcast, Eubanks and co-host Jason Goodall discussed which of the eight competitors in Jeddah had the best serve.
"I am going to go with [Jakub] Mensik,” said Eubanks. "I saw his serve first hand, he has an absolute bomb, he can hit mid to high 130’s with relative consistency. “I think he has the variety because the slice serve for him is so big it opens up the flat serves, it opens up the t and the deuce, the wide and the ads. As a returner sometimes you have to lean a little bit to get any type of clue but he can hit all the spots."
Goodall was in agreement with Eubanks, going as far as comparing Mensik's serve to that of tennis legend, Roger Federer.
"When he built up a nice rhythm on serve you could see he was holding serve really quickly," added Goodall. "It was Roger Federer like, under 60 seconds, hold after hold after hold. That gives him an opportunity to build up momentum, create confidence within matches, and can really hurt opponents."
Growing up in a household where soccer was king, my earliest memories are filled with chants from packed stadiums and the rhythm of a ball being passed across neighborhood streets. But somewhere along the way, the quiet elegance and raw emotion of tennis pulled me in. What began as a curiosity became a lifelong passion; not just for the sport itself, but for the stories it tells: of grit, of heartbreak, of improbable comebacks and human resilience.
As a tennis writer, I bring the observational lens of someone who didn’t grow up in the sport, but fell in love with it as an outsider; a perspective that lets me see both its technical beauty and its emotional depth. Over the years working with TennisUpToDate, I’ve had the privilege of reaching more than 3.5 million readers worldwide, with one of my features ranking among the site’s top three articles.
With a background in storytelling and a creative mind always searching for meaning beyond the scoreboard, I aim to craft narratives that go deeper than results and rankings. Whether it’s a rising star breaking through or a veteran fighting off Father Time, I try to capture the heartbeat behind the headlines.