How good, exactly, is Ben Shelton? I find myself constantly revising my answer to this question. Which is to his credit.

When he left college to go pro in 2022, I thought he was an outlier athlete with a big lefty serve and a lot of issues in his baseline game. I wasn’t sure how far that could take him. When he immediately made deep runs at the hard-court Slams in 2023, but barely won two matches in a row on the tour level, I became deeply confused. When he won a title on clay in 2024, I wondered if I misread him as a tennis player altogether. 

And when, this year, he entered the top 10, I was still having trouble thinking of him as a player of that caliber. At that point in the season—mid-June, grass courts—he had compiled an unimpressive record against top 20 players: just 1–6. That one victory, his best win at that point of the season, was against Lorenzo Musetti, on Lorenzo Musetti’s worst surface, hard court. Was Shelton really a player who would linger in the top 10? What is this numinous idea of a “top 10 player” I have in my head, and how would I need to reevaluate it in this Sincaraz era, where two players so vastly outclass the rest of the field that “top 10” becomes a purely ceremonial descriptor, because they still all seemed irrelevant when it was time to contend for the biggest titles? What was Shelton’s level, really?

Shelton answered some of these questions, forcefully, in Toronto this month. He won his first Masters 1000 title, and in terms of addressing my doubts about his performance against top players, he beat the world No. 17, 8, 4, and 16 along the way. He is closing the gap on Taylor Fritz as the top-ranked American on the ATP. And his tennis looks materially different from how it did when he first landed on tour. Though he seemed at the outset like a servebot, he has proved himself a far deeper player. With that serve he used to go for raw pace; now he’s developed a more eclectic repertoire, always keeping a returner guessing, the way a good pitcher would. From the baseline, he has a much higher rally tolerance. He used to bail out of these exchanges early, going for a premature winner, but he has since shored up his backhand and trusted his beefy legs to grind it out. In fact, despite being a serve-dominant player, he might thrive most on slower surfaces going forward, both because his stamina is a competitive advantage and because he needs the time to set up his ground strokes. Shelton relishes pressure; in Toronto he won three consecutive matches in deciding tiebreaks. And Ben and his dad, Bryan, have established the most persistent player-coach chatter on tour, constantly talking tactics between points. While their dialogue might seem excessive to old-school “solve your own problems” purists, this is the new reality of the tour, and they’re savvy to take advantage of it.

You can already see the fruits of his labor. In the three majors of 2025, Shelton was eliminated by either Jannik Sinner or Carlos Alcaraz, and he kept all of those matches competitive for at least one or two sets, which is more than the rest of the field can boast. There is something to be said for straight-up athleticism and a willingness to mix it up at the net. The serve will always be enough to get his foot in the door. The return game is still very much a work in progress. Of the top 50 players on the ATP, Shelton is currently 47th in percentage of return points won. That must improve. But since he’s sixth in percentage of service points won, he doesn’t need too much of a margin to win most of his matchups. With Sinner and Alcaraz establishing their new regime, it’s an open question who will fill out the upper middle class of the ATP in the years ahead. Daniil Medvedev is in free fall; Novak Djokovic is on his way out; Sascha Zverev has plenty of limitations. Who will it be? Jack Draper needs to stay healthy. Lorenzo Musetti needs to solve hard courts. Jakub Mensik, Arthur Fils, Joao Fonseca, Learner Tien—these all remain quite speculative. Ben Shelton is a good enough player to fill that void, for the moment. Who will follow him? And just how high can he rise?