Melbourne, VIC, Australia, 16 May 2025 | Matt Trollope

There is a subtle shift taking place in Australian tennis, and how the sport is played here.

Tennis Down Under was once exclusively a fast-court pursuit; grass courts could be found all over the country and up until 1988 the Australian Open was played on lawns.

A switch to hard courts heralded a new era, but Aussie players have continued to grow up training and competing on medium-fast hard courts while targeting success at big tournaments played on that surface – the Australian Open, plus the Summer of Tennis events leading into it.

It was not uncommon for Australian pros to succeed on clay, either. Pat Rafter was a Roland Garros semifinalist in 1997, before Lleyton Hewitt reached quarterfinals in 2001 and 2004. Sam Stosur went on to reach the final in 2010 – plus another three semifinals – while Ash Barty won the trophy in 2019. Nowadays Alex de Minuar is increasingly thriving on the red dirt.

ALEX DE MINAUR: Climbing on clay

Yet one year before her Parisian triumph, Barty famously declared: “Every week we’re on the clay is a week we’re closer to the grass.”

This perhaps epitomised the sentiment in Australia, where Wimbledon is revered, grass courts remain present in regional and rural areas, and the most popular period on the tennis calendar for Australian fans is January, when the sport plays out on our distinctive blue hard courts.

Changing the narrative

“As good as all of that is [Australian success on clay], you’ve got Lleyton and Ash winning Wimbledon, so there’s that next level. And then [great] hard-court results and whatever else,” former world No.4 Stosur told tennis.com.au.

“So it’s easy then to sort of discount [those clay results] and say, well, we don’t like it because it’s the worst one of the group. But if you actually look at it isolated, it is good, right?

“I think that’s where you’ve got to decide how you want to see those things.”

Stosur was unique among elite Australian professionals in that her game was at its most devastating, and consistent, on clay.

While she understands it’s not the preferred surface for many other Aussie pros, who came through the pipeline on faster surfaces, she believes a mindset shift is possible – and ultimately beneficial.

She cites herself as an example; she didn’t play on European clay until she was 15, lost every clay-court match she played in her first overseas junior tour, and did not taste victory of any kind at Roland Garros – juniors, qualifying or main draw – in her first five visits.

“I didn’t love it, but once I actually understood how to play on it and what my game could do on it, it became my favourite surface,” said Stosur, now Australia’s Billie Jean King Cup captain.

“I understand the idea that, ‘OK, it’s not a surface that I necessarily love, I’ve never really done well on it, so I’ll avoid it as long as I can, and work on my ranking and different things for the other part of the year’.

“However I think now, especially with the next generation below, let’s not make that part of it [the culture]. Let’s actually just learn how to play on it from an earlier age so that you can seek out the rest of the tour, and if your ranking is good enough to get into those events on clay, be there and be part of it.

“There’s absolutely no reason why Australians can’t play on clay. I think that narrative can absolutely change, especially now with the juniors starting to play on it more and different [clay-court] infrastructure. I think it’s really important.”

Scheduling pros and cons

More on those juniors later. But it’s not uncommon to see current Australian players avoiding the surface, even when the European claycourt season is in full swing.

During the week of 28 April, three Australian men – Alex de Minaur in Madrid, Alexei Popyrin in Aix-en-Provence, and Aleksandar Vukic in Estoril – were competing on clay. The rest were inactive or playing elsewhere on another surface, such as the hardcourt Challenger event in Guangzhou, China.

This was something former pro Luke Saville discussed on the Diary of a Professional Tennis Coach podcast last month.

“Possibly some tournament scheduling,” he replied, when asked if do anything different in his career if he had his time again.

“Every year it would come around sort of the March, April, and I was always sort of chasing points for the Grand Slam qualifying coming up at the French Open and Wimbledon, and I’d go and play the same Asian swing every single year because it’s hard court, and that was my best chance of getting [ranking] points.

“But early on I could have maybe said: ‘look, I’m gonna take five or six weeks and go and play on clay, and keep developing my game’.

“As Australians, we don’t play on clay anywhere near enough and when we go to Europe and South America you can definitely see that.”

Tim Jolley, Tennis Australia’s Chief Strategy and Performance Officer, is keenly aware of the predicament in which this generation of Australian players find themselves.

For many, they didn’t play a lot on clay growing up and may not have had much success on it professionally, meaning when it came to scheduling, it made sense to pursue ranking points, prize money and momentum elsewhere.

The flipside of that is a missed long-term opportunity to become a more well-rounded player. Clay is beneficial for developing point construction, consistency, variety, concentration and resilience, elements Jolley believes we’ll see more of in juniors coming through the Australian tennis pathway today.

“The surface that our younger players train on, when clay is available, it is predominantly clay,” he told tennis.com.au.

“If we’re training for a hardcourt tournament swing, they’ll move onto the hard courts, but if it’s just a training block, then most of that work will be done on clay to leverage these benefits.

“That is different to previous generations. Since I’ve come into the role [in 2020] I’ve strongly supported the significant increase in tours across all the age groups, and a central component of that is the European summer tours that we do to enable the kids to have the experience of playing tournaments against Europeans on European clay.

“If you just put two Australian kids against each other on the Melbourne or Brisbane clay courts, unfortunately that match is still going to look more like a hardcourt match. But if you put them on a European clay court, playing a European kid, all of a sudden they’re seeing a game style they don’t see even on clay in Australia.”

Embracing clay

Destanee Aiava, soon to compete at Roland Garros as a wildcard, confirmed Jolley’s point when she appeared on this week’s episode of The Sit-Down podcast.

“That was something I had to adjust to when I was in my teens and early 20s as well. I was kind of struggling on [clay] a bit more when I would go overseas to play other people; I’d feel a lot more comfortable playing at home on the clay [against other Aussies],” said Aiava, the world No.157.

“I think now, wanting to actually play the bigger tournaments and get my ranking up, I really have to change my outlook on it and get more experience playing high-quality players.

“It’s not something that I completely want to avoid, like, the clay season. I definitely have in the past couple of years (laughter). It’s just getting more matches on it, training, getting comfortable.

“That’s something that I definitely want to get better at and there’s no better opportunity than to do that now.”

The opportunity is also timely for Kimberly Birrell, who like Aiava played just one claycourt event – Roland Garros qualifying – for the entire 2024 season.

This year Birrell is at a career-high ranking of world No.60 and has embarked on a bigger clay-court schedule, part of her decision to embrace the challenges the surface presents.

KIMBERLY BIRRELL: Reframing attitude to clay

“I think [my hesitance on clay] maybe stems from just not playing on it that much at a young age,” Birrell said, “but that’s changing now with our juniors; they play and practice so much more on clay.

“I think that [unfamiliarity has] gotten out of the next generation, but it’s never too late for me to change that.”

Birrell’s comments came in Brisbane as she competed in the Billie Jean King Cup Qualifiers competition at the Queensland Tennis Centre, where Australian juniors were training on adjacent clay courts.

It reflects the future direction of the nation’s tennis development, and Jolley believes this could contribute to a shift in how the sport is played and perceived in Australia.

“I think just the fact we’re training so much more on clay and we’re playing more tournaments on clay, and tournaments on clay in Europe, that means, yes, there will be an evolution in the way that Australian players play,” he said.

“The [more natural] claycourt players tend to hit the ball with a lot more shape; we will start to see Australian players play more like that. We certainly coach an all-court game and we’ll continue to see Aussie players, hopefully, coming into the net to try and finish off points a little more than some European claycourters.

“But I think you will see some subtle changes in the way this generation plays, versus the previous generation.”