The junior Slams that predict future success

With the junior championships underway at Roland Garros, let’s pause to reflect on how significant a win in Paris is for predicting longer-term success.

One of the questions that those involved in player development often debate is how important the junior game is to future professional success. There’s one camp that suggests junior results have little bearing on what might happen in the future, while there is another that suggests players have to come from somewhere, and the junior game is the obvious breeding ground.

So, what’s the answer? Do the world’s best juniors actually become accomplished professionals?

To get at the question we first needed to clarify a few particulars – some terms of reference, if you like:

• We considered the world’s ‘best’ juniors to mean those that win a Junior Grand Slam (Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon or US Open).
• We took “accomplished” to mwn breaking through the magical top 100 mark in the pro game. Here, we could argue that the bar has been set too low, but cracking the top 100 signifies the first major milestone for most aspiring professionals. Also, ask any junior out there whether they’d like to know their chances of breaking in to the top 100 and I don’t think you’d need to wait long for an answer!
• Last point: the timeline is important as we needed to give players enough time to break through, so we’ve just focused on junior Grand Slam winners between 1980 and 2005.

This is what we found: when you compare the four slams across those 26 years, you can see that the French Open is the strongest predictor of top 100 success, while the Australian Open sits comfortably in 4th place. Incredibly, there was only one junior French winner over that time frame – in both the boy’s and girl’s games – who didn’t crack a double digit ranking. His name – Carlos Cuadrado – was widely regarded as one of the best young talents of his generation but whose transition to the pro game was disrupted by injury.

So why are the juniors that win the French better placed than counterparts that triumph elsewhere?

1. First, historically the tournament attracts the strongest draw of all the Junior Slams, with the implication that you need to be a better player to win through a deeper field.
2. Second, there’s a general view that clay is the best developmental surface, suggesting that if you’re winning on the dirt at a young age, your game is in good nick.
3. Third, over the last 25 years, the professional tour has transitioned away from faster court surfaces, so that’s been a bonus for any young player comfortable on the red stuff.

I suspect that all this is on the verge of changing (if it hasn’t already), but that’s for a deeper dive and for another time. For the moment, the moral of this story (for budding pros) is that if you could choose one Junior Slam to win, it’d be the French. And if you had to choose one court surface to learn the game on as a kid, it’d (still) be clay.