‘Challenger level is about survival’: brutal reality of life below elite tennis

Clips from THE GUARDIAN by Ervin Ang

“The cities, conditions are not the best, different from when you play the best tournaments. The Challengers are tough. Sometimes I get very upset because you go a long way to win 30 matches and you’re still outside the top 100. It’s way too much.”

The life of a player can be far from fancy. Casual fans may look toward Carlos Alcaraz’s lucrative sponsorship deals with envy, but those on the fringes of the top 100 and beyond live a starkly contrasting reality. The less glamorous side of the sport involves endless travelling, cost cutting to make ends meet and battling bouts of loneliness.

Kevin Clancy, a sports psychologist who worked with Ireland’s top players, believes tennis and golf are the most psychologically demanding sports. He says: “It’s roughly about 20% of the time that you’re on court and hitting the ball, so there’s 80% of the time where you’re doing a lot of thinking.

“Tennis is a sport that mentally could beat you up really, really badly. For players at Challenger level, it’s about survival. They need to play more tournaments and have that constant pressure of, ‘I need to perform and get points’.

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“These players are playing in front of a man and his dog in the middle of nowhere. It’s really tough from a psychological perspective.”

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 “It’s not just forehands and backhands, it’s how much can you suffer? How much can you travel? How much can you sleep in different beds every week? We take almost as many flights as pilots. It’s a lonely sport.

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For all their sacrifices, a juicy financial return is far from guaranteed. In 2024, Nikoloz Basilashvili returned from an elbow injury and earned $63,183 in prize money. But after subtracting flight costs and paying his coaches, the Georgian said he made a net loss of about $120,000.

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“You are mostly alone and you don’t really have a lot of friends to talk to. I don’t know if there is any other sport like this, to take a flight on the same day you play a match and then next week you are in another city. 

Whoa, Nelly

“WHOA, NELLY!”