What is Jenson Brooksby’s secret?

Jenson Brooksby had just upset fifth-ranked Stefanos Tsitsipas in a third-round match at Indian Wells. The 21-year-old Californian had bounced back after losing the first set 6–1, and run away with the third. He had given his home-state fans all the effort they could have asked for, and his intense competitiveness brought a jolt of electricity to the desert air.

Was his opponent impressed? Not so much.

“He’s not a very explosive player,” Tsitsipas said. “He’s not the most athletic player as well.”

How did this non-athlete beat him? According to Tsitsipas, Brooksby was “able to get balls back” and “read the game.” He was lucky, too.

“The amount of net cords he hit…I think that’s an incredible skill,” Tsitsipas said, with more than a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

When Brooksby’s coach, Joseph Gilbert, got wind of these words, he nodded a little. He’s been hearing a version of them for more than a decade.

“When Jenson was in the 12s, people said, ‘This game will never last,’” Gilbert says. “When he went to Baylor, they said, ‘It’ll never work in college.’ When he went pro, they said, ‘He’ll never be Top 100 playing like that.’ Each time he proved them wrong, they moved the bar higher and said the same thing.”

The Break: Who is Jenson Brooksby?

As far as Tsitsipas’ assessment of Brooksby went, Gilbert admitted there was some truth to it.

“He didn’t mean it in a nice way,” Gilbert says, “but I couldn’t disagree with him. Tsitsipas is an unbelievable athlete, a huge guy with a lot of speed. JT [Brooksby] isn’t going to match that.”

The thing is, in the two-man tennis world that Brooksby and Gilbert have created together in their out-of-the-way hometown of Sacramento, Calif., you don’t have to match your opponents’ athleticism. There’s more to the sport than that.

“I think a lot of player/coaches maybe don’t see how I could be as good of a level as I am,” Brooksby says.

“It’s what we shoot for, to not be too easily figured out.”

In working toward that goal, have Gilbert and Brooksby figured out something about how to play tennis that the rest of us haven’t?

Joseph Gilbert was, by his own description, a “solid college player.” He traveled the Southern California junior circuit in the 1990s with guys like Bob and Mike Bryan, and his friend Kevin Kim. Gilbert went to Boise State on a scholarship, but once there his focus shifted from his playing future to his coaching future.

“I was close with the coaches,” he says. “When I was 19, I was already trying it out, and knew what I wanted to do.”

Gilbert also knew what he didn’t want to do: Coach juniors.

“I had just come out of that world, and didn’t want to go back in,” he says.

Instead, at 21, he entered the world of private-club coaching, and did “the whole 10,000-lesson thing.” By 26, he was tennis director at a Sacramento club with a staff of 10 and a safely successful career ahead of him.

But when Gilbert spent some time traveling on tour and coaching Kim, he found that his competitive juices hadn’t dried up after all. He also found that he had his own ideas about how the sport should be played.

“I could see there were things I would do differently from what other coaches were doing,” he says.

In 2003, Gilbert began to put those ideas into practice with Collin Altamirano, a talented Sacramento native.

“I knew I wasn’t going to teach like Nick [Bollettieri] or Robert Lansdorp,” Gilbert says. “I tried stuff out, practiced a lot of things, put my own twist on it. It took five or six years to build a methodology of ‘this is how we play.’”

In 2013, Altamirano won the USTA National Hardcourts at Kalamazoo and became an NCAA champion at the University of Virginia. Along the way, Gilbert decided to leave the security of his director job behind.

“There was a big tournament happening and I was scheduled to do a margarita social at my club,” Gilbert says with a laugh. “I knew I couldn’t keep going like that. It was risky to start running my own business; the work never stops. But I dove into developing players.”

The two guys I’ve heard who seem to understand what he’s trying to do are Djokovic and Medvedev. I think that’s because they do a lot of the same things. Joseph Gilbert on Jenson Brooksby

Gilbert opened the JMG Tennis Academy in 2011. While the California coast has produced dozens of tennis legends, the same can’t be said for land-locked Sacramento. Gilbert knew the pool of talent in his 500,000-person city would be limited in a way that it isn’t for the USTA, with its countrywide reach.

“The U.S. is big on players with weapons, tall players, athletic players,” Gilbert says. “You can see it with [John] Isner, [Reilly] Opelka, [Frances] Tiafoe, [Taylor] Fritz, Tommy Paul; those guys are great athletes, and they’re doing amazing.

“But you almost never see a 6’10” person; I knew I couldn’t wait for the world’s best athlete to walk in the door.”

Instead, Gilbert looked for young players who could (a) focus for long periods of time, and (b) loved to compete.

“You can be on court four or five hours at a time, with distractions,” Gilbert says. “That’s hard for a lot of kids these days. You watch a guy like Rafa, and yeah, he’s a great athlete, but he also has this incredible ability to block everything out.”

Based on JMG’s results, Gilbert’s selection criteria seem valid. Many of the home-schooled kids that train there graduate with college scholarships. Another of his students, 20-year-old Katie Volynets, has been knocking on the door of the WTA’s Top 100.

Last year, Brooksby crashed through it on the men’s side.

Gilbert told journalist Paul Bauman that he first spotted a five-year-old Jenson Brooksby hitting against a wall at a club. He could see the kid had competitive spirit; rather than just practicing his swing, the first-grader looked like he was battling an imaginary opponent.

“JT was actually behind the curve on things like size, speed and coordination,” Gilbert says of Brooksby. “But he loved to play, he could focus for hours, and he had good hands.”

Focus, competitiveness, hands: That was enough for Gilbert. Where many in the player-development business see athleticism as destiny, Gilbert thinks tennis is a skill sport at its core, and with repetition, most skills can be learned. You can’t teach speed, but you can teach footwork; you can’t teach power, but you can teach a player to use angles and absorb pace.

“Size and speed matter, 100 percent they matter,” Gilbert says, “but how does someone like David Ferrer beat Gael Monfils?”

Brooksby was the perfect fit for Gilbert’s patience- and pattern-based philosophy; it also didn’t hurt that he later sprouted to 6’4”. Amazed by the long-running dominance of the Big Three, Gilbert studied their games and tried to transplant what he could into the young American’s style.

“The thing about those guys to me was that they don’t really have weaknesses,” Gilbert says. “That was our goal for JT: To have zero weaknesses.”

Brooksby didn’t leave home for an academy, mostly stayed away from USTA programs, and rarely traveled to international junior events. While other promising U.S. juniors have banded together and formed an informal fraternity, Brooksby, who plays piano in his spare time, went his own way.

“Some of the guys, they’re really cool guys,” Brooksby says of his countrymen. “They’re nice. We talk once in a while. But I don’t follow [their] scores or anything in general, other than myself.”

Instead, with daily lessons and basket-fed drills, he and Gilbert developed their own goals and maxims. Compete for every point. Stick with your patterns. Exploit weaknesses. Pay attention to details. Implement the right play over and over. Play the percentages over time.

“It’s not about power for me,” Brooksby says. “It’s more about learning to hit each shot, getting the little details right, and executing what we work on in practice each day.

“Our mindset is different. Joe keeps it simple, and we really try to learn as much as we can from every match. It’s about hitting the right shot at the right time.”

Size and speed matter, 100 percent they matter. But how does someone like David Ferrer beat Gael Monfils? Joseph Gilbert

The reigning theory of men’s tennis, based on analytics, is that players should hit as many forehands as possible and focus on the “serve-plus one”—i.e., use your serve to set up your first forehand. Gilbert isn’t a disciple of that doctrine. He wants Brooksby to hit every shot well, because that allows him to use a wider variety of strategies against different opponents.

“We don’t emphasize taking the forehand as much as most,” he says. “It’s a little more like chess, reacting to the other side rather than forcing an agenda.”

The Gilbert-Brooksby method has taken the tour by surprise, and elicited a variety of reactions—not all of them as skeptical as Tsitsipas’. Tiafoe has called Brooksby’s style “pretty strange.” Novak Djokovic calls it “crafty” and “intelligent.” Andy Murray says he has a “high tennis IQ.” Daniil Medvedev says “his strength is [to] put the ball in the right spot.” By mid-July, Brooksby was up to No. 33 in the world, seventh-highest among American men.

“The two guys I’ve heard who seem to understand what he’s trying to do are Djokovic and Medvedev,” Gilbert says. “I think that’s because they do a lot of the same things.”

But at 21, Brooksby still has plenty to learn. In Miami, he made headlines when he tossed his racquet and forced a ball boy to jump to avoid it. This spring, he went through a traditional rite of passage for American men when he spent two months on the road in Europe, slogging through the clay and grass circuits, and came away with a 3–6 record to show for it, before a third-round run at Wimbledon.

“He’s a very routine-based kid, and there’s no routine over there,” Gilbert says. “He’s used to training and drilling every day, and it’s tough to get the court time to do that on the road.”

Gilbert says he has a plan to fix that in 2023, and that he and Brooksby spend a lot of time working on how he can control his emotions without dampening his competitive spirit. For now, as the tour swings back to the hard courts of North America, and the temperatures soar, he should be in his gritty element again. And opponents like Tsitsipas will go back to trying to comprehend how he’s beating them.

“He’s not stronger or faster or more experienced, and he doesn’t have a bigger serve, so how is he winning?” Gilbert says, mimicking Brooksby’s many doubters.

So, how is he winning, this reporter asks?

“Ah, I’m not telling you that!” Gilbert says. “That’s for everyone else to figure out.”