Rising American star Ben Shelton making dream strides: “The more that I competed at a higher level, I had more trust in myself

Ben Shelton arrived at the Australian Open without having played any match outside his country and has been one of the surprises at the tournament.

The World No. 89 is undoubtedly one of the revelations of the tournament, he reached the fourth round of the first major of the year without having traveled outside his country before and has had an upward game as each round passes. For the passage to the quarterfinals, he’ll face the also American J.J. Wolf. The 20-year-old had only been in the main draw of a Grand Slam at the 2022 US Open, when he was eliminated in the first round by Portugal's Nuno Borges in 5-sets.

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After defeating local Alexey Popyrin in 3-sets, he commented with a smile: “It feels great”.

“Definitely a big smile on my face, I called my parents and they’re pretty happy so yeah, just a lot of happiness around.”, said the American.

Bryan Shelton, Ben's father was a professional tennis player in the 90's and won two ATP titles. Even though Ben wasn’t interested in playing tennis, he started playing at the age of 12 and was playing college tennis some years later. Currently, he is already a player who has entered the professional tour, and if he beats Wolf he will ensure his entry into the top-50.

The takeoff has been meteoric, in the Cinciniati Master 1000 he played being ranked 229th at this moment, and defeated Lorenzo Sonego in the first round. In the second round he defeated Casper Ruud, a top-5 and US Open finalist just two weeks later. Although Shelton had played mostly Challenger tournaments (all in United States), he had already achieved several wins against top-200 players, and it looked like he would make the jump soon. When he was asked why he had never played a tournament outside of the country, Shelton said:

“There were players inside of the U.S. that could challenge me and beat me every week, and I wasn't winning every single USTA tournament that I was playing. So my dad's thoughts were, 'I'm improving here, I'm not the best in the nation, and so there's not really a reason to go to a different country where I probably would lose and learn a lot of the same things”.

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"I'm not sure if there was a moment where things clicked, or it was just I knew that I was making gradual improvements in my game. I just started trusting myself more and more going into the summer.”

Now he is preparing to play world No. 67 Jeffrey John Wolf, who has only dropped one set in the tournament, and who has already shown that he can compete at the best level when he eliminated the 23rd seed Diego Schwartzman.

"The more that I competed at a higher level, I had more trust in myself to keep moving forward.", said the 20-year-old youngstar.