The DIY Game: how an unorthodox approach survives and thrives in the modern game

WATCH: Medvedev took his unorthodox game to a fourth title of 2023 at the Miami Open.

“Tennis isn’t a beauty contest. Nothing takes the place of being able to handle the pressure, getting set, maybe being off balance, and still finding the effective point of contact. There are people that look good but play bad and others that don’t look that good but play amazing. Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

Rick Macci, one of the premier developmental tennis coaches in the country, on the style and mentality of unorthodox players like Daniil Medvedev, Jenson Brooksby, and others.

If you watched the recent BNP Paribas Open final, or any number of other critical matches over the past few years featuring Medvedev, you might have found yourself wondering how a player with such a home-cooked game routinely gives as good as he gets in clashes with picture-perfect stylists like Carlos Alcaraz or Novak Djokovic.

There are a number of reasons for that, starting with the king of all the court tangibles, mental toughness. But that doesn’t explain how or why idiosyncratic players (the DIY brigade) manage to survive despite the universal emphasis on classic technique backed by countless hours of repetition. Some once feared that the explosive growth of tennis and the resources being poured into development would leave us with an assembly line of tenbots kitted out with identical, one-size-fits-all games, the ones at the top of the food chain feasting on those below.

“I have a philosophy and I teach the same technical things as most coaches,” Joe Gilbert, the developmental coach who mentored 22-year old Jenson Brooksby for 14 years until their recent split, told me in a recent interview.

“But then you get a player like Jenson and see that their physical abilities and specific talents are different. Then you have to take them in a different direction. Sure, I could have tried to make Jenson a guy who hits a huge serve and big first ball. The result would have been a mid-level college player.”

Now there’s no such thing as the wrong way or the right way anymore...What seemed unorthodox, and a liability at the time, became a great asset. Rick Macci

Instead, Brooksby was one of the breakout stars of 2022, bolting to a career-high ranking of No. 33 last July [he is No. 61 currently and off the tour until the late spring, due to a wrist injury that required surgery]. Gilbert knows that to some Brooksby might appear to be poorly trained but, “If you look at his technique, it’s not flawed. He’s just had to compensate for not being an amazing athlete, so he doesn’t look as classic or graceful as some.”

Brooksby’s game may look a little wonky, but then it was never obvious, physical gifts that caught the eye of Gilbert, who founded and runs the JMG Academy near Sacramento, Ca. Gilbert believes that for all the emphasis on athleticism, tennis is above all a skill sport, which is why there is still room for players like Brooksby.

“The impressive thing to me,” he said, “was the way Jenson was able to focus for long periods of time. He also had very good hands. He could do more reps and stay more consistent and because of those hands he felt the ball very well. That was his advantage over a faster, more athletic, more graceful kid.”

Veteran developmental coach Rick Macci is generally very different from Gilbert. His track record for producing Grand Slam champions at his eponymous tennis academy, in Boca Raton, Fla., bears comparison with that of the late Nick Bollettieri. Macci is forever searching for that perfect backhand or forehand, like a surfer seeking the perfect wave. He boasts about changing—and thereby improving—the games of all comers.

“Nobody puts humpty-dumpty back together again as well as we do,” he recently told me. ”But there’s also not a wrong way and a right way.”

Macci believes that many unorthodox players succeed in spite of their strokes rather than because of them.

“Someone recently showed me a picture of Medvedev. His feet were crossed over. He was hunched from the waist. His elbows were all over the place,” Macci recalled. “I said, ‘Wait a minute. You don’t know where that ball went. It could have been an ice-cold winner.”

Fundamentally, Macci still believes that unorthodox players could be even more successful if they worked toward a more conventional style.

“Someone like Medvedev is not your role model on how you hit the forehand, backhand or even the serve,” the coach said. “But he’s so far down the road, mentally and with movement, that he’s off the charts. It may be wrong for me to criticize someone who is No. 1, 2 or 3 in the world, but I believe he could be even better.”

Macci is an old-school formalist. His paragon is former protege Jennifer Capriati. “You could put a glass of water on her head, or on her shoulders, and she wouldn’t spill it when she hit the ball,” Macci said, “And she was always prepared and willing to hit the ball.”

But over time, Macci was obliged to become more flexible due to changes in equipment—enabling spin and increased racquet-head speed—as well as the young age at which so many youngsters begin training for tennis.

“Now there’s no such thing as the wrong way or the right way anymore,” Macci said. It’s something he learned from Venus Williams.

The Williams family left Los Angeles for Florida in 1991, around the time Williams turned 12. They began training with Macci who soon noticed Venus’s unusual open-stance, two-handed backhand. Being a coach who never met a stroke he didn’t want to fix, he tried to persuade her to hit more off her front foot, and to keep the racquet head above the wrists. But Macci eventually recognized the unconventional genius of the shot. He backed off, and now believes that Venus’s open-stance, down-the-line backhand is one of the greatest all-time shots in tennis, saying, “What seemed unorthodox, and a liability at the time, became a great asset.”

Rafael Nadal is rarely called idiosyncratic anymore—how can you be considered an outlier when your success sets the standard?—but his game is a testament to what can happen when a coach just allows a player to express his or her natural tendencies instead of imposing a template. The approach has taken hold, as attested by the profound way that grips, stances, even swing paths have changed compared to yesteryear. Even the federations and nationally-financed development programs, once the ultimate example of “my way or the highway” training, adapted.

For example, the USTA Player Development program has evolved into a much more flexible entity. It no longer swoops in to whisk talented prospects away from their homes, families and/or coaches. Instead, the USTA has decentralized, empowered private coaches, and facilitates any coaching, training, or living arrangement that appears to be working well for a player. This has led to greater tolerance for different and even eccentric styles—as long as they bear fruit. That’s why Frances Tiafoe’s forehand still looks so unorthodox despite all the work he did with USTA coaches.

“You can imagine the chatter we heard about that forehand when Frances was like 15 or 16,” Martin Blackman, the General Manager of USTA Player Development, told me. “But the coaches working with him, led by Jose Higueras, decided that since the shot did not break down under pressure and the fundamentals were good, why change it?”

Most good coaches, Blackman added, still have “fundamental parameters” for how they want proteges to play. Those tend to be immutable. The big difference from the past is that the stylistic range is much broader. There’s an additional bonus to the liberalization of how the game is taught.

“The great thing now,” Blackman added. “Is that because there’s more flexibility and the parameters are wider it really lends itself to athletes being able to express themselves and do things that are special.”

Or, as Gibert said, “Some of these players get a bad rap for being unorthodox instead of people going, hey, this is pretty cool. It's a different way of looking at the game. That would be really cool if tennis promoted that.”