Jack Draper and James Trotman are in each other’s shoes again. Before this week, the British No. 1 and his coach had not spoken since parting ways on the Eurostar platform in London at the start of the month.
They were heading home from the Paris Masters, which marked the end of the most seismic season of their lives.
“You start living in each other’s shoes too much,” said Trotman, who has coached Draper for the past three years. ‘I try to give him as much space as possible to do what he wants.’
Player and coach needed some time to leave tennis – and each other – behind. But eliminating it is not easy for Trotman.
And so he spent almost an hour of his precious free time talking to Mail Sport – on his daughter’s birthday no less. It’s a bit like school holidays: the students are off, but the teachers still have to plan their lessons and Trotman is planning Draper’s pre-season, the details of which – including a week of training with tennis’s new superstar – he reveals exclusively here .
“We will be in London for the first four weeks, then we will train for a week with Carlos Alcaraz at Juan Carlos Ferrero’s academy (in Alicante),” says Trotman.
James Trotman (right) has guided Jack Draper through the best season of his career to date
Draper is now the British number 1 and has broken into the top 15 of the world rankings
He is not resting on his laurels and will train with Carlos Alcaraz in the off-season
‘It is extremely important to spend time with the best players in the world, experience that every day. We are all really looking forward to it.’
What an opportunity for Draper to compete with the Wimbledon champion. It also shows respect that Alcaraz wants to take a closer look at the man who convincingly defeated him at Queen’s this summer.
That victory was a highlight for the 22-year-old in a year of many. Trotman – an LTA coach seconded to Draper, and not an employee of the British No. 1 – has remained behind the scenes; the only time he appeared in front of the media was prior to the US Open semifinals, and even then he held back before the biggest match of Draper’s life.
But now that the book has been closed on a transformative 2024 season, Trotman tells Mail Sport the story of how he guided Draper from injury-prone kid to world number 15 player.
“Jack burst onto the scene in 2022 and achieved a career-high ranking in the 1930s,” Trotman said from his home in Merton, near Wimbledon.
‘Everything was new, fresh and exciting. He suffered three injuries in 2023. He did not play back-to-back tournaments from the Australian Open through the US Open. That was a difficult time for Jack, a dark time. He looked at his career and realized how delicate it can be. That moment was important.’
The next turning point came this spring. In consecutive events, Draper lost final-set tiebreaks to Nicolas Jarry (then world No. 23), Hubert Hurkacz (No. 8) and Taylor Fritz (No. 15).
“Those three losses were decisive,” Trotman says. ‘I felt a shift in his desire and belief and in the level at which he considers himself capable of playing the sport.
‘Playing those games back to back was the best thing that happened to him. If those matches are spread over twelve months, it will not have the same impact.’
At that moment, a penny that Trotman had been trying to hammer into his student’s brain for months finally dropped. Draper was ready to embrace the kind of aggressive tennis a 6-foot-2 man should play.
“It was that light bulb moment where Jack said, ‘Okay, that’s enough. I’m okay with losing to these guys, but I’m going to lose if I play on my terms,'” Trotman says.
It hasn’t been a smooth ride to the top for Draper, who lost three very close games in a row last year as his progress faltered
Trotman (left) believes these losses are the ‘best thing to happen to Draper’, and that the Brit has since turned a corner
“These were conversations we’ve had over the last 20 months about trying to play a certain way, but there was reluctance (from Draper). Part of this is because he was smaller as a kid and had to defend a lot in his junior career. We didn’t want to lose that ability. It’s about defending when you have to, but not more than necessary.’
This period coincided with the critically acclaimed addition to Draper’s team of former world number 6 Wayne Ferreira. The relationship lasted just three months – “in the end it didn’t get off the ground,” Trotman says – and Draper’s mentor admits to some frustration with the way the media pushed that “super coach” narrative.
“Wayne has had a great career and has done an excellent job coaching Frances Tiafoe. It was a story that should be written about,” Trotman says. ‘But I do think the media has dwelled on it for too long.’
Ferreira’s tenure coincided with a terrible first round defeat at the French Open to Draper and a sub-par Wimbledon. Trotman says the addition of a new voice “probably disrupted Jack’s rhythm a little bit,” but the South African conveyed a similar message that Draper needed to play more aggressively, and his added authority helped drive the point home.
Coaches have access to highly sophisticated data, and after our conversation, Trotman sends over some numbers to illustrate how Draper has become more assertive.
One statistic measures how often a player plays in attack, defense or neutral. The tour average in attack is 25 percent. For Draper, that figure was 22 percent in 2023; Since the start of the grass season this year, this has risen to 27 percent.
Last year he hit his more stable backhand two percent more than his dangerous forehand; that has turned to a 10 percent gap in the other direction.
“These are subtle changes, but a match often comes down to three or four points anyway,” says Trotman. ‘Small changes can make a big difference.’
Trotman is a man for small changes and they have come in all areas for Draper this year.
“Jack is more in tune with his diet,” he says. “He wasn’t a bad eater, but there was just more focus from Jack that it was something he wanted to do better, with more detail.”
For example, Draper developed a taste for coffee and Trotman noticed a pattern: “Sometimes he would have a little too much caffeine and that could affect performance.” After Wimbledon, Trotman issued a caffeine-only diktat and Draper has barely lost since.
Part of that streak took place at the US Open and culminated in a semifinal against Jannik Sinner, in which Draper decorated the Arthur Ashe court with vomit.
Draper had his best performance at a major when he reached the semifinals of the US Open in September
Draper threw up on the court during his semi-final defeat to Jannik Sinner due to nerves, and Trotman is now looking at small adjustments that could take his leadership to the next level.
Draper has partly attributed the nausea to anxiety and Trotman admitted this is an area they are looking at as a team.
“Jack had a hard time,” he says. ‘It was an extreme match. He had a few games this year where he suffered from reflux. I don’t think there is a player who doesn’t suffer from some form of anxiety. It’s like anything: trying to improve a service or physical work. Our job is to find solutions.’
Marginal gain has become a muddied concept, but that seems to describe Trotman’s philosophy: “micro changes” as he calls them, applied to every area of Draper’s game and repeated over time to produce “massive improvements.”
Outside of tennis, Trotman’s passion is modern art. He calls it ‘the only thing I have for myself, that liberation that gives me the space to think about something else’.
If Trotman were an impressionist painter, he would be a pointillist: a series of tiny spots on the canvas, hundreds of dots of adjustment and improvement that come together to form a masterpiece.