November Recap

November is the last tournament month on the ATP Challenger Tour and ATP Tour calendars. In November everyone at the tournaments is already talking about just one thing:

“The ranking cut for the Australian Open”

Every tennis player wants to take part in the Grand Slam tournaments because they are the most prestigious events in our sport, with the most world ranking points and the most prize money. Some players end the season in October because they are already qualified, until the last week usually only the players who still need points play for Australia.

Despite the great successes in 2023, it was not yet clear at the beginning of November that we as a team would be able to qualify together for the Australian Open 2024. We still had to get a few points, and of course the competition still had a chance to overtake us. Our first tournament in November was the Challenger 75 in Ismaning on carpet, it is the last Challenger tournament in the world to be played on carpet. Last year I was able to reach the final there together with Fabian Fallert. Constantin Frantzen and I had to survive some close games to reach the final again. There we were defeated by the German/Indian pairing Begemann/Balaji. It was once again very nice to play in front of a home crowd and see many familiar faces, which gave us strength despite a long week.

 On Sunday we went straight on to the ATP tournament in Metz. To date we haven't been able to win a match on the ATP Tour and it was one of the last chances to collect a lot of points for Australia. In the last ATP tournament in 2023 the knot actually broke and we were able to play our way to the final with good performances. There we were defeated by the Australian Open finalists 2023 Hugo Nys/Jan Zielinski. We worked a lot on our game all year and after many bitter ATP Tour defeats we were finally able to show our level at this level.

Thanks to the final in Metz, we secured participation in the Australian Open, so Metz was the last tournament in 2023. Last week we played 3 games for TC Loon Plage in the French Pro A, the counterpart to the German Bundesliga. With 5 wins on 5 match days, the team qualified for the final on December 2.12nd.

With sporty greetings

Hendrik