Tennis Mailbag: What’s Next for Serena Williams, Iga Świątek and Ben Shelton After Wimbledon

Submissions have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity

As it is written, Wednesday is mailbag day.

• Here’s the 50 parting thoughts column from Wimbledon.

• Here’s your Served podcast wrapping up 2026 Wimbledon:

Onward …

Jon, here are some brutal reality checks after one week of Wimbledon:

1. Serena’s comeback. Now that the obligatory media celebration of Serena’s comeback is over. Let’s take a reality check. She’s obviously promoting her weight loss pill for which she wanted to come back and market it hard. We are bombarded with ads about how much weight she has lost. And how much faster and better she is able to move. Reality is that at her age without year in year out conditioning, she will not be able to win. Even though she’s the greatest women’s player of all time. She’s not gonna weight-loss-pill her way to wins on the tennis pro tour. A year’s commitment to conditioning and superhuman effort? That might work.

2. Iga Świątek. Iga seems to have a fundamental gap in her understanding of the game. Due to this, she has peaked in spite of her incredible abilities. Her answer to everything seems to be more racket head speed, and that’s really working against her. It might be time for her to peek over to Novak Djokovic’s side of things (she's a massive Rafael Nadal fan), and master weight transfer and direction changes on the rise, which will make her unbeatable.

3. Ben Shelton. Ben’s got till the end of this year to get a serve coach and make the most of it. There’s Martina Navratilova, Gilles Müller, Johnny Mac, heck even Adrian Mannarino can help him out.

Vijay

• I’ll start by saying your implied point is well-taken. One of the beauties of tennis is that it is close-knit and there’s a sense of community. People treat each other with respect, extend the benefit of the doubt, and might be reluctant to burn bridges with an uncharitable take about someone you know, to otherwise be a good person. Broadcasters might share agents—and certainly agencies—with players. Broadcasters sometimes want to be coaches, so they bite their tongue. One of the downsides of it all: Coverage can be soft-pedaled, and hard truths can be, well, hard to come by.

1) I don’t deny that the media—and I don’t exempt myself—really amped up the celebration of Serena’s comeback. I also don’t deny that the (relentless) tie-ins to a GLP–1 have been under-covered as an issue, shortchanged in the coverage, and uncomfortable to many, perhaps women in particular. (If the great Serena Williams takes weight loss medication, who shouldn’t be on it?) This is precisely the kind of thorny, nuanced issue about which independent media might seek more information, answers and discussion; alas, Serena skipped her mandated press conference.

But the big picture is that Serena is back at 44. She is competing. Her kids can appreciate their mom. She’s headed to Toronto (for doubles with a younger partner and perhaps for singles, too) and then the U.S. Open. On balance, it’s a big and inspiring story. And I’m not sure “a year’s commitment to conditioning and superhuman effort” is the requirement for success.

2) You raise a technical issue. Yet, Świątek is so quick to talk about her emotional state and dissect it in terms of confidence, judgments and pressure, both external and internal. Yet she has long utilized the services of a sports psychologist, who sits in the box for all matches, attends practices, and by all accounts plays a prominent role in Świątek’s career. Świątek is such a fine player, and, I would add, a fundamentally decent person, who is to be commended, not condemned, for being true to herself and avoiding the look-at-me attention economy. One hopes she figures it out and reroutes her career.

3) I’m not sure why “the end of the year” is the deadline for a 23-year-old. But I do agree his serve could be maximized, mostly through decision making, not technical retooling. If he hires Mannarino, I’ll bring donuts to the office.

Jon, I know you were talking about Félix Auger-Aliassime replacing [his coach] on Tennis Channel. Why would he do that now that is a top five player and coming off a Wimbledon quarterfinal? I don’t get it.

Sammy

• This refers to the announcement that Félix Auger-Aliassime is parting ways with Frédéric Fontang, his coach since he was 16.

It’s a bit like Coco Gauff’s drop shot on match point, pull it off, and you’re a genius. (Gauff, savvily realizing that her opponent was pinned in the back of the court and had gripped her stomach moments earlier, chose to end her triumph not with a mortal blow forehand but with a cold-blooded drop shot!) The gamble/gambit fails, and it prompts the question: What were you thinking?!

If both players ascend, they will be commended for a courageous personnel move, suggesting they weren’t satisfied with merely being a quarterfinalist. If they backslide, well, this is what you get for changing the quarterback mid-game.

Maja Chwalińska and Arthur Fery were both ranked 114 before their spectacular runs at Roland Garros and Wimbledon this year. The only other two lucky 114s to make it to a Slam semi? Aslan Karatsev in 2021 and Patrick McEnroe in 1991, both at the Australian Open.

Enjoy!

Paul Marin, Lewes, DE

• Great pull. We are suckers for numerology, but this figure also underscores how much talent resides outside the top 100. And how tennis—and this is a great virtue—has the capacity to transform careers in a short amount of time. You might be Crash Davis, the best minor league baseball player ever, but unless you’re called up to the big leagues, there’s a ceiling on your career. In tennis, a hot streak of a half dozen matches and you’ve metamorphosed.

Hi, Jon:

I bow to your insightful mind. When you wrote “Czech, please” in your 2026 Wimbledon midterm grades, I just read it as a fun fact. Now, two Czech women will play the final this coming Saturday. It just dawned on me that either by knowledge, intuition, their combination—or another element I cannot identify right now—you might have consciously or unconsciously anticipated this could have been the outcome. Now that it is a reality, all I can say is: Tip of the hat to you.

Regards, Lourdes Pereira
(BC, Canada)

(BC, Canada)

• Thanks—no bowing required. We talked a bit about the Czech over-indexing on grass on Served. Andy made a good point: the weather is a hidden advantage, and training indoors helps players on fast surfaces. I have a few thoughts. There is an emphasis on training and athleticism, which helps encourage versatile tennis. Players tend to stay in the Czech Republic, which means top-level practice partners and coaches are always available. The grand dame, Martina Navratilova, set the standard for all-court, attacking excellence.

Linda Noskova defeated Karolina Muchova in the Wimbledon final. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

Hi Jon,

If Reilly Opelka wants to make more money so badly, maybe he could do it by winning more? He hasn’t won a title in four years and has only reached the fourth round of a Grand Slam once. His targeting of doubles players who are just trying to make a living seems like punching down and feels a little gross.

Seth, Denver

• This refers to Reilly Opelka’s open hostility toward doubles players. It’s not cool to disparage colleagues in public. It’s not cool to demean the worth of others in public. When management sees labor sniping at labor, it emboldens The Man and hardens the belief that labor is supposed to be cheap and disposable. When you are an oft-injured serve machine, hardly known for your aesthetically pleasing tennis and crowd appeal, you further undermine your credibility.

We all should applaud the unconventional. We should, as a rule, applaud athletes for speaking their minds and departing from corporate talking points. But—in a Nick Kyrgios kind of way— that doesn’t give you carte blanche to be offensive or violate the social contract. This is terminally not cool.

Hi Jon! I know I’m likely in the minority on this but I miss the 2 p.m. (London time) start to the Wimbledon singles finals. As it is, it’s currently 2:26pm EDT and I feel like the day is getting away from me. But I can’t walk away from the men’s final.

What say you?
Rod, Toronto Canada

• Agree, It’s too late. It also kills the Wimbledon Ball.

Other than certain players, of course. I don't think many fans would mind: no dogs and no babies at professional tennis tournaments. I just saw that Wimbledon won’t allow players to bring their dogs. Thank goodness. What the players don’t understand about a dog is that it's not about the player. If a dog could talk, I would bet anything the dog would say that Centre Court is the last place the dog wants to be. Babies need to be added to the list. Say, anyone under the age of 3 or so. It makes no sense for someone to bring a baby to a tennis tournament.

Jim Yrkoski, Silver Creek, Neb.

• Roland Garros went all out on accommodating players’ dogs, even offering walking and grooming services. Wimbledon had a no pets policy, service dogs notwithstanding. I poked around a little on this. The grass is a big factor. So are the United Kingdom’s pet quarantine rules.

I’m indifferent here. So many players, WTA in particular, travel with a pet. Given the dissonance and displacement of tennis, it’s understandable you’d want a reliable companion. Understandably, some events would want to accommodate players. It’s understandable that Wimbledon, in particular, wouldn’t want the hassle.

The best Arthur Fery comp I can come up with is Dominika Cibulková.

J.B. Portland

• I like that. An undersized scrapper who still played with pop and competed steadily and was prone to being overhit, yet she wasn’t going to beat herself. Cibulková had an underrated, decade-plus-long career. She had a top-10 showing and played deep into all four majors. Let’s see how and where Fery—now a top 40 player—goes from here.

Shots, Miscellany

• Shoutout loyal mailbag reader Jeff Gewirtz, whose blazing forehand on match point clinched the bronze in singles for Team USA in the Masters Tennis Division of the 2026 Maccabiah Games.

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