MELBOURNE, Australia — There’s a certain kind of grin that stretches across Carlos Alcaraz’s lips when discussing the 2025 U.S. Open.
Alcaraz, who will play Alex de Minaur in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open Tuesday, knows how good he was in that tournament. He’s still just 22, but he appears to think that last summer in New York, he was as good a version of himself as he will ever be: A tennis wrecking machine with the buzz cut of a marine.
He didn’t lose a set until Jannik Sinner nicked one off him in the final, the briefest of speed bumps during a stampede of a fortnight. From start to finish, apotheosis-level Alcaraz blasted serves and dominated, from the back to the front of the court and everywhere in between. It was the sort of flow-state performance that players wish they could bottle and repeat over and over.
Alcaraz was asked about it after his straight-sets, third-round win over Corentin Moutet in Melbourne, which meant he had won 30 of his past 31 sets. How did his level through the past week compare to what he did a few months ago?
Cue the Cheshire-cat grin.
“To be honest, I cannot compare it,” he said.
After reaching something like a perfect expression of what he wants his tennis to be — “perfect,” his coach at the time, Juan Carlos Ferrero, said of his U.S. Open performances — Alcaraz won some more, before losing the ATP Tour Finals final to Sinner. Then he went into the off-season.
But he wasn’t about to bottle and repeat his Grand Slam excellence, nor his attendant reclaiming of the world No. 1 ranking.
It was time to tinker.
The sport’s most gifted player may also be its greatest tinkerer, as clips from his practices on social media so often show. Ever since his star-making major, three-and-a-half years ago at the U.S. Open, Alcaraz has readjusted and recalibrated restlessly, especially on his backhand and on his serve, the only part of his game that once fell short of off-the-charts. It was as rhythmic and precise as it had ever been at last year’s U.S. Open, and for much of the year.
During the 2025 U.S. Open, the sight of Carlos Alcaraz stepping up to serve was a scary one for opponents. (Kena Betancur / AFP via Getty Images)
“Just making changes all the time, every tournament, every day, without someone (having) to tell me,” Alcaraz said in his pre-tournament news conference.
Maybe that’s what makes the greatest ones greater than the rest. To everyone else, they are perfect. To them, that means they need to make some changes to stay ahead.
There has been no shortage of Alcaraz adjustments during the bright and shining first part of his career. Both his forehand and his backhand swings have become more concise and direct.
Unless he’s got the time to really cut loose, the roundhouse wind-ups are gone. He uses his slice backhand more. He also has honed his mind to avoid the dips in focus that have occasionally cost him matches, but in most cases just delay an inevitable triumph.
But the most attention has gone to the serve. This is typical for tennis players, because it is the only shot they control from start to finish without having to worry about how an opponent has hit the ball at them, and what they have to do with it.
They can hit it how they want. For top servers, their superior coordination, especially between the hand and the eye, allows for adjustments without too much strife. Taylor Fritz said he remembers changing his serve when he was 16, after he made the semifinals of the Wimbledon juniors. He adjusted his stance on his second serve to give him a better chance to put the ball high over the net.
“I literally changed it in one day,” he said.
Alcaraz has been tweaking his motion since he became the sport’s next chosen one, well before Sinner took over the No. 1 ranking for most of two seasons. At various times, he has changed his starting position, his take-back and his tempo, before changing them all back in one form or another in search of a rhythm and a feel that always seemed elusive.
Then he walked onto Arthur Ashe Stadium at the U.S. Open, hair buzzed and wearing his sleeveless eggplant kit. His serve was the smoothest thing in his frictionless title run.
The halting motion that had always seemed so out of place in a game filled with effortless grace now fired like a racecar accelerating across a start line. And it didn’t just look good. The results on court were outrageous, snuffing out the few openings opponents had.
For the season, Alcaraz’s serving was about even with the rest of the tour, and even a little worse by some measurements than it had been in 2024, even though his serves were landing slightly closer to the lines. During ATP Tour matches in 2025, his serves landed on average 64 centimeters from the lines. In 2024, it was 65 centimeters. The tour average is 59. He won a slightly lower proportion of first-serve points in 2025 (67 percent) compared to 2024 (69 percent), with similar results on service games won (86 percent vs. 89 percent).
But at last year’s U.S. Open, he went supernova.
He won 83 percent of first-serve points. He won 98 out of 101 service games, losing one to Novak Djokovic in the last four and one to Sinner in the final, after losing just one in his other five matches.
Flash forward three months, and videos began to surface of Alcaraz tinkering with his motion again, in uncanny fashion. It began to resemble an impression of Djokovic’s serve, keeping his racket high and moving his spine through the shot with Novak’s trademark twist.
Djokovic and Alcaraz serves, side by side pic.twitter.com/WdzgBixP09
— The Big Three (@Big3Tennis) January 13, 2026
“Everyone has to make changes, small details,” Alcaraz said. “For me, the serve is something that I really want to be better every year, in every tournament. I’m just putting constant work on the serve.”
He was even using a mini basketball hoop, held by coach Samuel López, to calibrate his toss.
He swears Djokovic 2.0 wasn’t the idea. Then again, he’s studied the 24-time Grand Slam champion as much as he’s studied anyone. Perhaps it was inevitable. If it turns out that way, it’s not such a bad outcome.
Carlos Alcaraz’s tinkering with his tennis — especially his serve — is helping him to sustain greatness. (Darrian Traynor / AFP via Getty Images)
“He doesn’t hit the fastest serve, but is super accurate,” Alcaraz said of Djokovic’s serve. “You cannot read it. It’s really, really difficult to read it.”
He described the ball as a “sleeper” when it hits the lines, sliding off the court, nearly impossible to get back. “Sometimes you’ve got to go for the precisions more than the speed,” he said.
The tinkering has landed Alcaraz in a very predictable place: he is into the quarterfinals without losing a set. Tommy Paul was his latest victim, in a fourth-round tie that was a tennis aesthete’s ideal of elegance. Two graceful, athletic, all-court players going toe-to-toe for two-and-a-half hours and three tight sets — and one of them able to streak away from the other when he needed. That made it 33 of the past 34 Grand Slam sets won.
For now, first-serve points won number is down from the U.S. Open, at 74 percent. So too with service games, at 54 of 59. But everything else is clicking into place. The backhand has evolved too, adding more potential whip and pop, especially when he hits it crosscourt. Again, tinkering.
As Alcaraz evolves, what matters most is his comfort level with his strokes, especially the serve. This time, he promises, he’s feeling “a really comfortable, smooth, really calm and peaceful rhythm.”
And yet, no matter how comfortable he is, he also promises he will continue to tinker.
“Probably you’re going to see another change,” he said. “I don’t know if next month or at the end of the year. I just make constant changes in every shot.”
Of course, the outcome almost never changes.
