Interesting article about Denis' path, including going his own way without much help from Tennis Canada. It shows that there can be more than one path forward for the up and comers.
Extract from article:
....If he makes it, Shapovalov had to promise to invest the same amount in another promising prospect down the road.
The odyssey through the bowels of the ITF Futures Circuit – $10,000 total purses, no points in the qualifying, two if you get to the quarter-finals and 18 (and a little over $1,000) if you win the title, was a game-changer. As a comparison, the winner of this week’s Rogers Cup gets 1,000 ranking points.
Between November 2015 and May 2016 (with a couple of pit stops in Canada), Shapovalov and Furiovia traipsed through Niceville, Pensacola, Tallahassee, Plantation, Sunrise, Weston, Memphis, Little Rock, Orange Park and Vero Beach.
Most of those tournaments are played in small clubs on Har-Tru, an artificial clay surface that was kryptonite to Shapovalov’s attacking game and isn’t even used on the ATP Tour any more.
At first, his ranking was so lowly he had to qualify for these events, and many of these tournaments have 128-player qualifying draws. That’s 128 players with tiny rankings and big dreams, most much older and more physically mature than Shapovalov.
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Team effort: Shapovalov and doubles partner Félix Auger-Aliassime with Tennis Canada coach Guillaume Marx (far …
The surface taught him to be more patient and construct points better. The multiple matches taught him to take on a heavy workload. And the constant competition even on days he wasn’t feeling his best taught him how to win ugly.
By the end of it, he had broken into the top 400 and was making waves.
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https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/blogs/e...their-way-has-been-the-highway-115901394.html