Shang Juncheng had been a promising talent for years, getting to World No. 1 in juniors and working under IMG since he was a kid. The 2023 campaign still left us with plenty of questions regarding his fitness though, especially with the Chinese suffering from mononucleosis in the first half of the year. But as it turned out, this year most of these issues went away and the 19-year-old produced a brilliant season with a Top 50 finish and his first ATP Tour trophy.<\/p>\n
The improvement began in the first week of the year already with Shang surviving a couple of brutal battles against Laslo Djere and Botic van de Zandschulp to later beat Frances Tiafoe and make his first ATP Tour semifinal. It was such a huge contrast compared to his last few matches in 2023 when the Chinese was out of gas in every deciding set played. A third-round appearance in Australia followed and you could see the 19-year-old was able to take his game to the next level.<\/p>\n
But it wasn’t all bed of roses for Shang, who had a relatively quiet clay swing and didn’t catch fire again until the grass. A quarterfinal showing and a two-set lead against Grigor Dimitrov at Wimbledon were more signs of greatness to come from the teenager, but he wasn’t able to keep up the flawless level required from him by the Bulgarian. It wasn’t the only time the 19-year-old went 2-0 up on a big name at a Slam in 2024, failing to convert that advantage against Casper Ruud at the US Open as well.<\/p>\n
The biggest result of the season was still to come for Shang. At the very beginning of the Chinese swing, the 19-year-old was one of the dark horses at the ATP 250 in Chengdu. He proved that he deserved that moniker with wins over experienced rivals like Kei Nishikori or Alexander Bublik, before taking down Lorenzo Musetti to claim his maiden ATP Tour title. In the altitude hard court conditions in China, Shang was able to rely on his serve much more than usual and play with a lot of freedom on the attack.<\/p>\n
The Chinese teenager is nowhere near his final form yet and the last few months of the season had him putting in some very erratic performances again. His match against Carlos Alcaraz in Shanghai drew a lot of hype, but the 19-year-old found himself unable to replicate the serving quality from Chengdu. That left him with no answers as the Spaniard was cracking any ball off his forehand side. As amazing as Shang’s progress has been, he’s still looking for a first win against an elite opponent (the biggest win of his career so far came over No. 14 Ben Shelton, whom he leads 3-0 in the head-to-head).<\/p>\n
But nonetheless, you can’t complain about a season like this and Shang eventually became the second player from his country to break the ATP Top 50 after Zhizhen Zhang. It’s a great starting position for 2025 but before we get there, the 19-year-old will also make his first appearance at the ATP Next Gen Finals (he’s the first Chinese to qualify for that event).<\/p>\n
Main photo credit: Taya Gray\/The Desert Sun \/ USA TODAY NETWORK<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Shang Juncheng had been a promising talent for years, getting to World No. 1 in juniors and working under IMG since he was a kid. The 2023 campaign still left us with plenty of questions regarding his fitness though, especially with the Chinese suffering from mononucleosis in the first half of the year. But as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2968,"featured_media":55700,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[17300,18524],"class_list":["post-76594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atp","tag-juncheng-shang","tag-shang-juncheng"],"modified_by":"Jim Smith","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2968"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76594"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76637,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76594\/revisions\/76637"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}