ATP: Yannick Maden – The Secret Ascender

Eleven German players were in the main field of the BMW Open at the beginning of the week. However, one of them reached the main draw in a relatively curious way: Yannick Maggots.

Maden was actually only scheduled to qualify for last weekend’s ATP 250 event, but was still on the pitch at the parallel tournament in Budapest. After a match aborted on Friday, the 28-year-old was still in Hungary on Saturday and was allowed to move up directly into the 28-player main field in Munich.

Once there, he did an outstanding job. Maden, whose portrait photo on the official ATP homepage is more like an application picture than that of a tennis player, is only on this level for the sixth time. Thus, his first-round success at the MTTC Iphitos against number 8 seeded Japanese Yuichi Sugita was also the biggest victory of his career. He fended off two match points in his 4-6, 7-6, 6-2 win on May Day.

“It was a monstrous atmosphere here. That was just great to play,” Maden was pleased after his opening victory at the Aumeister.

The Stuttgart native has been successful in the singles at the ITF Pro Circuit eight times so far. So far it has not been enough to win a title on the ATP-Challenger-Tour. Nevertheless, he probably plays the best tennis of his career at the moment.

Still outside the top 250, he qualified out of nowhere for his first main field on the ATP World Tour at the European Open in Antwerp at the end of 2016, where he lost to the French ex-Top-10-Crack Gilles Simon.

One year later at the Moselle Open in Metz Maden reached the round of the last 16 and finally last week in Budapest the first quarter finals. A personal top position in 119th place is a well-deserved reward.

“Why everything went so fast now, I can’t say,” Maden is looking for an explanation for his good results lately. “Since the middle of last year, when I played the semi-final at a Challenger in Rome, things have been going steadily uphill. Then suddenly there comes the self-confidence. I also had a bit of luck from time to time,” admits the likeable Swabian, who hardly played any junior tennis but was active in college at Clemson University and finally completed his Bachelor’s in Financial Management in the state of South Carolina.

“Impact and the train forward,” Maden identifies the most important construction sites on which he still wants to work. The right-hander trains in the performance centre in Stuttgart-Stammheim. His father “Mickey” owned a tennis hall in rural Schwieberdingen and for many years organized an ITF future, which enabled Yannick and his brother Dominique to enter the first professional tournaments.

But the fact that on Wednesday afternoon on the Center Court in Munich it wasn’t quite enough and he lost against Jan-Lennard Struff 3-6, 6-3, 3-6 is not meant to put an end to a success story that may be just beginning.

“It was a tough match,” Struff admitted in his subsequent press conference. “Yannick is a very solid player who makes few mistakes. I had to work hard for the points.” Words of a number 62 in the world, which maggots can judge as both a compliment and an incentive for future matches.