The NextGen Finals for the best young male players in tennis has already proven to be a reliable indicator of which young men are likely to ascend the rankings or even challenge for Majors in the following year. Since 2017, the year of the tournament’s inception, its two most celebrated winners, Jannik Sinner (in 2019) and Carlos Alcaraz (in 2021), have already both won multiple Majors and ascended to World No.1, and another winner, Stefanos Tsitsipas (in 2018), has also reached a Grand Slam final. Hamad Medjedovic, the 2023 NextGen winner, is yet to reach those giddy heights, but in reaching his first ATP final, at the Belgrade Open in his native Serbia, he has reminded everyone of his prodigious talent.
Hamad Medjedovic’s 2023 NextGen Win
Medjedovic’s NextGen win a year ago was so impressive that it is worth revisiting it, because it was the first time that most of the tennis world had seen the full range of the young Serb’s talents. In defeating Switzerland’s Dominic Stricker in the semifinal and top seed Arthur Fils in the final, he not only belied his No.6 seeding in the eight-man event but suggested that he could become one of the finest and fastest servers that tennis has ever seen. Even Fils, for all his undoubted athleticism, could not find an answer to Medjedovic’s sheer firepower in the final.
Indeed, despite the fact that Medjedovic also showed commendable skill and touch, especially at the net, his serving at the 2023 NextGen Finals was so consistently magnificent that he emerged from the tournament with not one but two nicknames: “Hamad The Hammer,” as he had already become known; and “The Serb With The Serve.” Both nicknames were a testament to the potency of his biggest weapon, namely his huge serve.
But Slow Progress Since
Having won the NextGen Finals in such commanding fashion, it seemed likely that Medjedovic would follow in the hallowed footsteps of previous NextGen champions like Sinner and Alcaraz by making a significant impression on the ATP Tour and even making inroads at the Majors. However, unlike Sinner and Alcaraz, he has largely been unable to convert his outstanding NextGen Finals win into consistent performances on tour during the next 12 months.
Indeed, Medjedovic has only been consistent in delivering consistently underwhelming performances, certainly in comparison with his consistently outstanding performances at the 2023 NextGen Finals. That is proven by his current ranking. At the end of 2024, he is ranked at 112, which is not only outside the top 100 but below his highest ranking of 102, which he actually achieved before the NextGen Finals last year.
There have been relatively few highlights for Medjedovic in 2024. Prior to the last week, the biggest highlight for him this calendar year was probably reaching the third round of the Italian Open in Rome, where he lost to the defending champion Daniil Medvedev but only after three incredibly tight sets. His fine run in Rome helped to propel him into qualifying for the French Open, but he lost in the first round at Roland Garros to Flavio Cobolli, one of the other young players on tour who he had completely outperformed at the NextGen Finals six months earlier.
Finding Himself Again on Home Soil
Arguably, it has taken Medjedovic the whole of 2024 to come to terms with his NextGen Finals win, adapt to the far greater rigours of the ATP Tour and rediscover his best form, and it was probably no coincidence that he finally excelled on home soil, at the Belgrade Open. In that ATP 250 event, which has been held before in the spring but was staged in the autumn or fall this year, Medjedovic produced his finest series of performances of the year and in the process reminded everyone exactly why he is nicknamed “The Hammer” (and it’s not just because it sounds like his first name).
Just as he had in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia at the end of 2023, Medjedovic’s superb serving and the remarkably easy power he can generate on his groundstrokes allowed him to cut through a swathe of more highly ranked players to reach the final in Belgrade. First, he saw off the U.S.A.’s Brandon Nakashima (who himself had won the NextGen Finals in 2022) in three sets in the round of 32, before beating another American, Aleksandar Kovacevic, in straight sets in the last 16. However, it was in his matches in the last eight and last four that Medjedovic really played the kind of tennis that had been so thrillingly effective a year earlier in Jeddah.
First, he achieved the biggest win of his career so far, in terms of beating a player ranked more highly than him, when he defeated Argentina’s Francisco Cerundolo in straight sets and for the loss of just six games in total. Cerundolo, despite being generally a fine returner, simply had no answer to the thunderbolts that Medjedovic was consistently firing at him and ended up losing fairly limply.
The semifinal was an all-Serbian affair, with Medjedovic facing his gifted compatriot Laslo Djere. In the first set, it seemed that Medjedovic would just sweep Djere away, as he won it 6-2. Thereafter, however, things became much tougher for the younger Serb. Indeed, in the second set there were times when “The Hammer” looked hammered, as he was frequently left bent over double after long rallies. After the match, he admitted that he had been suffering from stomach cramps, which made his eventual recovery to win it all the more impressive. In the third set, he somehow he managed to remain level with Djere until the tie-break, which he convincingly won 7-2.
Belgrade Final Was a Disappointing End to a Largely Disappointing Year
In the Belgrade Open final, Medjedovic faced a player who five years ago was similarly being hailed as a bright young thing, namely Denis Shapovalov. However, just as Medjedovic has had a largely disappointing last year, Shapovalov has had a largely disappointing last half-decade. With the notable exceptions of reaching the Wimbledon semifinal in 2021 and then helping Canada to win the Davis Cup in 2022, he has not really fulfilled the potential that he had shown at such an early age, especially when he reached the fourth round of the 2017 US Open when he was only 18.
Shapovalov is still only 25, but he is obviously vastly more experienced than Medjedovic, which may have been why he coped much better with the pressure of playing a final against someone who was overwhelmingly the crowd’s favorite. And it was that ability to cope with pressure that enabled him to break away from Medjedovic at the end of the first set, when he broke the young Serb before serving out for the set, and at the start of the second set, when he broke Medjedovic again and then successfully held his own serve to close out the second set and the match.
Like a number of other finals at this time of year, notably the Paris Masters final in which Alexander Zverev virtually thrashed Ugo Humbert, the Belgrade Open final was ultimately a one-sided disappointment. It was obviously particularly disappointing for Mededovic, who was playing his first ever ATP final in his home country, cheered on vociferously by home fans. In losing it so easily, perhaps because he was overcome by nerves that accentuated his pre-existing stomach cramps, Medjedovic was unable to finish his year as NextGen champion by winning a first ATP title, as Jannik Sinner, for example, had done in 2020 when he triumphed in Sofia.
But The Future Is Still Bright For Medjedovic
Nevertheless, the future remains bright for Medjedovic. It is true that he has not effortlessly made the transition from NextGen winner to regular tour competitor, let alone regular tour winner, in the fashion of Alcaraz and Sinner. Equally, however, every player develops differently and at their own pace, and there is no doubt that Medjedovic retains the weapons, especially that extraordinary serve, that will allow him to compete at the very top of the men’s game.
Overall, Medjedovic’s 2024 season has not been good enough to enable him to qualify for this year’s NextGen finals, which took place last week. In one sense, that is disappointing, as players like Cobolli and Alex Michelsen, who he beat convincingly at the 2023 NextGen finals, seem to have outstripped him on the ATP Tour this year. But ultimately it could be a good thing, as it will allow him to forget about his NextGen win and get in a full off-season in preparation for 2025. That might just be the year that he translates his NextGen win into sustained performance, and sustained success, on tour.
Main Photo Credit: Clayton Freeman/Florida Times-Union]
