Ben and Bryan Shelton, son and father, hit the road as players and coaches

When Ben Shelton decided to drop out of college and turn pro last year, he asked his father, Bryan, a former player on the men’s tennis tour, aloud if they should start a venture together.

Sorry, Bryan Shelton told his son, he already had a full-time coaching job at the University of Florida. Bryan Shelton handed over the reins to Dean Goldfine, a highly respected coach who had previously worked with former world No. 1 Andy Roddick. Perhaps, they reasoned, it was better this way, to give the 57-year-old father and his 20-year-old son a healthy distance for his first few years as a professional.

Then Ben became the breakout star of this year’s Australian Open, with his booming serve to the singles quarterfinals, while Bryan was home in Gainesville, Florida, getting the Gators ready for the spring season. As it turns out, even well-adjusted middle-aged dads can be prone to FOMO. In early June, shortly after the Florida men’s team was eliminated from the NCAA Division I tennis tournament, the Sheltons announced that Ben had a new/old full-time coach.

“It was the right time,” said Bryan Shelton.

On June 12, father and son departed for grass season and the next phase of their relationship, which will make a major podium debut this week at Wimbledon, where Shelton, who has been heralded as a star in the making, is slated to play Taro Daniel in the first round Tuesday.

“We knew that ultimately this is what we wanted to happen,” said Ben Shelton at the All England Club on Saturday.

Parent-child relationships can be fraught. Combine coaching, which is not uncommon in tennis, especially when a parent is a former pro, and they can quickly become “toxic and tough,” in the words of Bryan Shelton.

Stefanos Tsitsipas yelling at his box during games, while his coach and father, Apostolos, sometimes yells back, can make spectators feel like awkward guests at an awkward family dinner. On the other hand, things seem to be going well for Casper Ruud, who has won (but lost) three of the past five Grand Slam finals under the tutelage of his father, Cristian. Like Bryan Shelton, Cristian Ruud was quite the pro on the ATP Tour.

Looking for the Ruuds between tournaments or on days off? Try the nicest nearby golf course, where they compete as college buddies. Still, after losing to Novak Djokovic in the French Open final last month, Casper Ruud, 24, said he wouldn’t rule out someday receiving guidance from someone other than his father.

“It can always be good to have new, fresh eyes on your game,” he said.

For Ben Shelton, there are benefits both on and off the field to have his dad around, he said. Given his muscular frame and Florida Gator’s 12-month rise from outside the top 400 to Grand Slam quarterfinalist, it can be easy to forget just how young and raw he is in tennis years and life experiences.

A late bloomer, Ben didn’t play most of the major youth tournaments growing up. He attended a regular high school instead of a tennis-oriented academy. His trip to Australia for the Open and the preliminary tournaments was his first trip abroad.

This year’s clay court swing was his first trip to Europe. On Saturday, he confessed that he had been homesick earlier this year during a trip without his parents.

Not only has he never played Wimbledon, but until the middle of last month he had never set foot on a grass court. He won one of his three matches on grass in recent weeks, although both defeats required a decisive third set.

Expectations are high for Ben’s Wimbledon debut, and joining his father, who previously coached and won his own matches at the All England Club, could boost his chances.

The young player’s pounding serve, forehand and ability to move forward on the pitch make grass an ideal surface for him, if he knows how to stay low and master the quick, controlled foot movements that winning on grass required.

The first two days were tough, Ben said on Saturday.

“My legs felt weird,” he said. “And after those two days, I started having a lot of fun.”

Bryan Shelton said he always told his son that Wimbledon is the game’s most special location, a place where he had dreamed as a teenager to play in Alabama to watch the famous matches between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe on television. In 1989, he walked onto a field field to play Boris Becker, who was already a two-time Wimbledon champion at age 22, two years younger than Bryan Shelton. Becker defeated him in three sets.

“Someone got a video on an iPad and handed it to me so we could watch it,” said Bryan Shelton. “Better than I thought it would be.”

He reached the fourth round of Wimbledon in 1994, his best performance at a Grand Slam tournament, by beating the second seed, Michael Stich of Germany, in his opening match.

Bryan Shelton said he and his wife, Lisa, had been talking for the past six months about giving up his college job to work full-time with Ben, but first he needed to make sure Ben still had him. wanted to have. He did.

During Ben’s early teens, before Ben went to school, father and son practiced on the track every morning at 6:45 am. Through that experience and during Ben’s college career, Bryan learned a lesson nearly all parents learn about their children: Despite all that shared DNA, they’re not mini-me’s.

Bryan loved to practice on the tennis court and practice for hours. Drilling bored Ben. Competition drives him. He has to play more points in training.

Bryan said that as a junior player there were times when Ben would come home from a loss in a tournament and Bryan would ask his son what went wrong.

This was before Ben had grown to six feet and 195 pounds. He would tell his dad to just get bigger.

Bryan didn’t necessarily like that answer. He would tell his son that there were always things he could get better at, that he should list the elements of his game that he needed to improve, as Bryan had done after some of his losses. But that wasn’t how Ben tapped.

“I got in his way,” said Bryan Shelton. “What I’ve learned I need to do is let him think about how good he is and know he’ll do the job.”

Like every coach and player, they’ve had their moments on the field. There are times when Ben needs to let off steam and Bryan wants him to be in control. An hour later someone apologizes and they move on. They share an understanding that people make mistakes, and they try to enforce their “no grudges” rule.

Ben said his dad has gotten good at picking up on the cues that it’s time to transition from coach mode to dad mode. Bryan sets a time limit on a video session so they don’t constantly watch and talk about tennis. So far, he likes to let Ben go out to dinner with friends, while he stays in his hotel room, ordering and watching golf.

“He’s pretty easy to travel with,” Ben said of his father.

Good thing. They will be working on it a lot.