The Tennis Ball’s Biggest Critic Thinks “They’re Getting Better”

Around this time last year, I wrote about why so many men's tennis players hated the tennis balls used on tour. Chief among those critics was Daniil Medvedev, who said that the allegedly inferior balls moved slower through the air, thus undermining his counterpunching style and making him feel "zero pleasure of being on the court." A year later, he already sounds a lot happier.

Medvedev won the Brisbane 250 earlier this month, and looks as if he might be shaking off the roughest season of his career. After he won Tuesday's second-round Australian Open match against Quentin Halys—thus surpassing the sum of matches he won at Slams in the entirety of 2025—Medvedev fielded a reporter's question about slow courts and heavy balls. The former malcontent sounded totally peachy:

Q: There's a lot of talk about the slowness of the courts, heaviness of the balls in tournaments around the world. How does the Australian Open compare to that this year, and in particular, the two stadiums that you've played on so far this year?

A: Yeah, I already said in Brisbane, for sure it's been talked for a long time, but I do feel like court's getting faster. Like, I heard Hong Kong is super fast. Brisbane was pretty fast as well. Feel like Australian Open is not slow. I'm not going to call it fast, because you do see some rallies, and maybe ace is a bit less than in Hong Kong, Brisbane for example. But it's kind of medium speed, or maybe even tiny bit to the faster side.

And same about the balls. I've been the biggest—probably at one point—crying about the balls and this and that. I do feel like they're getting better. It's still the reality that racquets change, courts change, games of players change. Now everybody is ripping the ball, and we still have the same change rules of balls. [Under current rules, new balls are swapped in after the warmup and first seven games of the match, then every nine games after that.] This is maybe something to look into, because I don't know when this rule of 7-9 was implied. But if it's like 15 years ago, maybe. If it's 40 years ago, it was a different story.

But again, in general, I think that's what I feel right now, that we're being heard, and pretty much a lot of variety on the court and on the balls as well.