Keys Unlocks Her Toolshed

Madison Keys' racquet switch, from Wilson to Yonex, has opened new abilities and possibilities late in her career.

MELBOURNE, Australia — Veteran agent Max Eisenbud was skeptical when he heard one of his longtime clients, Madison Keys, was thinking about a late-career shakeup.

“I’m historically really against changing racquets,” Eisenbud told Bounces this week.

Tinkering, Eisenbud believes, undercuts the confidence that comes from stability.

“I would always get worried that they'd like it in practice or training and then, at 4-all, 30-all in the third, you don't know if the ball is going to land in when you're nervous or tight, you know?” Eisenbud said. “You know that other racquet that you’ve been using your whole career, right? So it’s comfortable when you're nervous in tight situations.”

Eisenbud was hesitant, but Keys had a new advocate for change in her corner—and in her household.

[The paywall has now been removed on this article to celebrate Madison Keys’ unexpected run to the 2025 Australian Open title -Ben]

Love, Orlando Style

Bjorn Fratangelo had been a junior major champ, beating Dominic Thiem in the boys’ singles final of the 2011 French Open. Like many junior champions, however, he did not match his youthful heights as a pro, but he did break into the ATP Top 100 briefly five years later, for one week in 2016.

His relationship with Keys, whom he had known as a friend for years through American tennis circles, turned romantic after the two moved into the same Orlando apartment complex.

“She was on the fourth floor; I was on the first,” Fratangelo recalled. “We just started hanging out more and more, and by mid-2017 we started dating.”

Fratangelo didn’t involve himself directly in Keys’ tennis, however, until the middle of the 2023 season, when she asked him to come with him to Eastbourne after her previous coach had left. Fratangelo, whose own playing career was winding down, has been part of her team ever since.

In an interview with Blair Henley and Adam Peacock on the Australian Open’s “Blue Zone” channel, Fratangelo said combining the roles of romantic partner and coach hadn’t been something he was seeking with Keys.

“We’re used to it now,” Fratangelo said. “I still don't love it. I don't like the idea of it. But, I think it's working.”

Retooling a Longtime Relationship

Keys soon had many strong runs with Fratangelo in her corner, including a run to the 2023 U.S. Open semifinals. But the biggest impact he’s made seems to have come within recent months, when he convinced Keys to switched away from her lifelong use of Wilson racquets to the Japanese brand Yonex.

Keys had used Wilson, which has a partnership with the Evert Tennis Academy in Boca Raton where she trained in her youth, since before she was even a teenager.

Madison Keys and her Wilson racquets in 2015. (Photo by Andrew Campbell)

But the Wilson racquets were limiting and taking a toll on Keys, Fratangelo believed. He told The Blue Zone that when Keys switched from one Wilson model to another in 2021, it was to a model that was a “lesser evil,” but still “way too demanding for today's game.”

After Keys withdrew from last year’s Australian Open due to shoulder issues, Fratangelo urged her to consider using a racquet that would be easier on her body.

“‘It’s time that you recognize your age, recognize where you are in your career and really kind of just embrace a change—like, an actual change,’” Fratangelo said he told Keys.

Keys was still under contract with Wilson for the rest of the 2024 season, however, which limited their options. Fratangelo said Wilson sent over six different models for her to try. Keys “put down five with five minutes”; the sixth, which had a more open string pattern, became her choice for the rest of the 2024 season.

Fratangelo also convinced Keys to stop using any old-school natural gut—a material manufactured from elastic fibers extracted from cow intestines that gives trampoline-like power over control—in her racquets.

“She had no wrist pain, and within 10 minutes she was like, ‘Whoa: every ball drops in the court,’” Fratangelo recalled Keys saying. “And I was like, ‘Yeah. Welcome to 2024.’”

Keys isn’t the only player I’ve covered who took convincing to switch strings. In 2012, Serena Williams wasn’t convinced to change her all-gut string configuration until suffering a shock loss to Caroline Wozniacki in Miami in 2012.

From my July 2013 New York Times article:

Since making the switch, Williams has been on perhaps the best run of her career, compiling a 94-4 singles record. In that 15-month stretch, she has won 13 titles, including three Grand Slam titles (Wimbledon and the United States Open last year and the French Open this year), her first Olympic gold medal in singles and her first three titles on red clay since 2002.

Williams sought a change after a disappointing straight-sets loss to Caroline Wozniacki in Miami. She asked Wilson representatives to replicate the strings of the only active player who had more Grand Slam singles titles than she did: Roger Federer. (At the time he had 16 to her 13; now he has a 17-16 lead.)

“She inquired: ‘Hey, what’s Roger using? That seems to be working out pretty well for him,’ ” said Ryan Polito, the global product manager for Wilson.

Williams tested Federer’s setup, a hybrid of natural gut and a different type of Luxilon string, but was not satisfied. Wilson representatives then gave Williams some Luxilon 4G string that had not been released.

“Honestly, she went out on the court for an hour, and she said she loved it,” Polito said. “And she wanted as many sets as I could give her, so she could go practicing and playing with it in tournaments.”

Along with the changes in strings, Fratangelo and Keys worked on retooling her service motion late last season. Once Keys finished her 2024 slate of tournaments in Wuhan, the pair got to work testing racquets from other manufacturers. Keys was '“open to anything,” she said.

“I was just looking for a little bit of, I guess, safer, easier power,” Keys told me after her fourth round win here over Elena Rybakina. “I mean, I loved my [Wilson] racquet for a really long time, obviously, because I stuck with it for so long. But I felt like it was just getting a little bit difficult to play with on bad days, where it just wasn't really helping me enough. I was searching for more help and an ability to, on the days where you're not feeling it 100 percent, be able to kind of figure things out and still be able to make the ball.”

Making It Official

Keys had never seriously considered switching racquet brands before, Eisenbud told me, but her coach and longtime partner had the experience of switching (from Babolat) to Yonex in the middle of his own playing career career.

Bjorn Fratangelo and his Yonex racquet at the Cary Challenger in 2023. (Photo by Hameltion)

While Keys didn’t wind up taking Fratangelo’s last name after their wedding in November, she did want to take his racquet brand.

“I didn’t need a whole lot of persuasion,” she said.

bjornfrat

A post shared by @bjornfrat

Keys couldn’t articulate what it was, precisely, that appealed to her about the Yonex racquet; she couldn’t answer, for example, when I asked if her new racquet was lighter than her previous one.

“I'm not super ‘on it’ when it comes to equipment and things like that,” Keys said. “I'm more: I pick things up, I tell you if I like them or hate them. That's kind of it. So to be totally honest, I have no idea why I like this racquet, what it does, like, all the specifics of it. I just knew when I picked it up, it felt really good, and that was the winner.”

Fratangelo saw Keys immediately smitten with the new racquet.

“It was instant,” Fratangelo said of Keys’ connection with a Yonex racquet. “It was ten minutes and she was pretty sold.”

Eisenbud, however, was not so quick to buy it. He had represented Keys, 29, since she was 12 years old, negotiating renewals of her Wilson contract every three or four years.

“She told me like from the first day that she really liked it,” Eisenbud told Bounces of the Yonex racquet. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK.’ I've been managing her since she was 12 years old, so I know her pretty good.”

Eisenbud didn’t want Keys to commit to anything she’d regret. When she played an exhibition match in Charlotte in December, she played with a Yonex racquet painted black, because she was still under contract with Wilson until the end of 2024.

“Then she started to get pretty serious, like, ‘"OK, I’m going to go to Australia with it,’” Eisenbud said. “I’m like, ‘My God, this is now getting real.’ Up until then, I wasn't really taking it too seriously.”

But Eisenbud still didn’t want Keys locked into any commitment in case she would have second thoughts after playing real tournaments.

“I told her that I didn't feel comfortable doing a deal with Yonex until like after the Australian Open,” he told Bounces. “The last thing I want to do is do a deal with Yonex and then she goes to Australia and she doesn’t feel it. I'm always trying to look at the worst case scenario.”

But early returns were strong for Keys, who reached a quarterfinal in Auckland in the first week of the season, then won the WTA 500 Adelaide tournament in the second week.

“Obviously after she won Adelaide, I texted her: ‘I guess it's safe to say I should start sitting with Yonex and try to do a deal,’” Eisenbud said. “After she won Adelaide, it was 100% sure we're going to switch to Yonex.”

Eisenbud was wary of players who wanted to switch brands primarily for monetary reasons, but was ultimately convinced that Keys was switching for the right reasons.

As a goodwill gesture during ongoing talks with Yonex, Keys has begun having the company’s logo painted on her strings during this tournament, even though she is not yet under contract.

Through a representative, Yonex declined to comment on this story in Bounces, citing that their negotiations with Keys are still ongoing.

“She loves Wilson and they've been amazing to her,” Eisenbud said. “She'd been with them a long time. But, you know, she's at the end of her career. She's making a decision solely based on that she thinks that this racquet is better—not on money.”

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Australian Open Day 11 Matches to Watch:

All matches local time to Melbourne

No. 19 Madison Keys vs. No. 28 Elina Svitolina — 11:30 a.m. on Rod Laver Arena

Keys knows she is not the only player retooling and evolving. When she watched Svitolina’s third-round win over No. 4 Jasmine Paolini, she saw how much the veteran Ukrainian has made her game into a more attacking style in recent years.

“Honestly, I was so impressed,” Keys said of Svitolina. “She was really going for it and really going after her shots and hitting some incredible forehands.”

Keys leads the head-to-head 3-2, but the pair have not played since Svitolina returned from maternity leave in 2023.

“I definitely think it's not going to be, like, the typical matchup that we have had in the past,” Keys said. “I'm definitely going to have to go watch some of her, because it was not vintage Svitolina playing.”

No. 8 Emma Navarro vs. No. 2 Iga Swiatek — Not before 1 p.m. on Rod Laver Arena

Iga Swiatek has been rolling through this tournament, and I guess the only surprise is that it feels surprising? She’s been so good on hard courts, generally, since surging into the top 10; maybe we were all just making too much of the limited sample size of her mid-tournament exits the last two years here.

It’s been an interesting event for Navarro: she’s made a third consecutive major quarterfinal, all without seeming to play anywhere near her best, dropping a set in each of her four scrappy wins here. The winning ugly is a different kind of skill for her to be unveiling, I think, but she will need to up her level significantly to hang with Swiatek.

Or, more optimistically, maybe Navarro has just been playing to the level of her competition so far? If she can keep that up, Swiatek, who was hugely untested in a 6-0, 6-1 fourth round win over Eva Lys, could get caught flat-footed.

No. 21 Ben Shelton vs. Lorenzo Sonego — Not before 2:30 p.m. on Rod Laver Arena

It’s a funny quirk of draws and scheduling that this match, the unlikeliest of the four men’s quarterfinals by far, will be played a day after the Alcaraz-Djokovic blockbuster.

Shelton should be the big favorite, having been the only seed left in his quarter of the draw since before the fourth round began.

Which makes me want to ask the audience here: was that a reasonable thing to mention to Shelton or not? My co-host Tumaini Carayol on No Challenges Remaining said it was a goofy question, not realizing it was me who had asked it. (You can listen to our Australian Open midway episode here):

Anyhow, I think Shelton has been a comfortable favorite in this section since Fritz bowed out, and I expect him to get past Sonego with relative ease.

No. 1 Jannik Sinner vs. No. 8 Alex de Minaur — 7:30 pm on Rod Laver Arena

The real test for Craig Tiley came with this match: would he put local hope Alex de Minaur outside of primetime for this match, in hopes that the heat could wilt Jannik Sinner once more?

Ultimately, this match stayed in the night session, and it probably wouldn’t have made a difference since the heat dropped off significantly earlier today.

De Minaur would need any help he could get, really: he’s 0-9 against Sinner previously, having won only one set in all their previous meetings.

Unless Sinner’s health remains compromised, expect him to roll here.

Thanks for reading Bounces! -Ben