By Chloe Wellington-Hunt
X/Instagram: @chloemwhunt
For Arthur Fery, improvement does not always look like improvement.
Some weeks, something clicks. The serve feels better, the forehand does what he wants it to do, and the results offer tangible evidence of the work behind them. Then another tournament arrives and the progress can suddenly feel less obvious.
At the ATP 250 event in Winston-Salem, Fery spoke about the ups and downs of the process.
“You know, some tournaments you do things better, then the next tournament feels like you haven’t improved at all,” Fery said. “So it kind of comes in ebbs and flows.”
It is an appropriate way to understand Fery’s season. The 24-year-old Brit has already achieved one of the major goals he set for himself, breaking into the top 100 after a year that has included his first Grand Slam main-draw qualification in Australia and a breakthrough run at Wimbledon.
Yet listening to Fery throughout the week at the Winston-Salem Open, the milestones seemed almost secondary to what he believes still needs to get better. Fery is proud of where he’s come, but he is ready to put in the work.
There is the serve he is adjusting. There is the forehand he wants to develop. There are service games he knows he could have started better and matches where his level has fluctuated. Even the victories become information.
“Yeah, so it’s always, always, always a work in progress, and there’s a lot of things to work on,” Fery said.
That mindset was apparent after his straight-sets victory over standout Wake Forest player and world No. 389 Mees Rottgering.
Fery won in two sets, but his first assessment was not entirely self-congratulatory. Instead, he acknowledged the unevenness of the afternoon and the threat posed by Rottgering, who repeatedly pushed him in a match that became far more competitive than its two-set conclusion might suggest.
“Yeah. Yeah, it was a tough match. Tough match. Lots of ups and downs. I started well and, yeah, it ended up being a battle,” Fery said. “But, yeah, Mees is playing really well right now. He’s had some great wins and, yeah, I definitely came into the match nervous and knowing that he would be able to play well. So I’m happy that I got it done in two sets, and lots of things to work on, but, yeah, happy I got through.”
There were stretches when Fery struggled on serve and allowed Rottgering into games too easily. Several times, he found himself facing the possibility of being broken before producing the points necessary to escape.
“Yeah, periods where I wasn’t serving well at all and just giving up cheap points at the start of the game, and faced quite a lot of break points,” he said. “But, yeah, I played some good points when I was close to getting broken and, yeah, he gave me a few errors here and there. But managed to get out of a few games, which was really helpful.”
It was the kind of match that illustrated two sides of Fery’s development at once. There were problems he could identify almost immediately, but there was also the increasingly important ability to solve enough of them in real time to win anyway.
For Fery, that process never really stops.
“You know, there’s no match where everything is perfect, so you’re always searching for, ‘What can I do better on my backhand? What can I do better on my forehand?’” he said. “Whether it’s technique or what you’re trying to do with it, there’s always room for improvement, and I feel that.”
Then came perhaps the line that best explains Fery’s relationship with the sport.
“So there’s no clear answer. You know, you’re always searching. That’s the beauty of it as well.”
Fery has had plenty of reasons this season to appreciate how far that search has already taken him.
Wimbledon naturally dominates the story of his year. But when asked to think beyond that run and identify another moment that stood out, Fery first went back to the beginning of the season.
“Yeah. I played well in Australia at the start of the year. That was really, for me, a breakthrough,” he said. “Managed to qualify for my first Grand Slam, win—yeah, beat Cobolli first round. So that was great.”
It represented something concrete: qualification for his first Grand Slam main draw followed by a victory over Flavio Cobolli.
But Fery, who has spoken about his ability to recall matches stretching back through his career, also chose a less obvious memory.
At the Miami Open, Fery found himself two breaks down in the deciding set against Bu Yunchaokete in qualifying. He recovered and won the set 7-5.
“I qualified in Miami, played a really tough match, second round of qualies in Miami for the Masters, and, yeah, I’d say that was also a good moment,” Fery said. “I was a double break down in the third set against Bu, yeah, to qualify, and managed to win 7-5 in the third.”
“So I’d say maybe that’s, like, a more—yeah, a more, like, niche moment that I enjoyed and I can recall.”
It is easy to construct a season around its biggest result. Fery’s recollections reveal something more complicated.
Australia mattered. Miami mattered. Wimbledon mattered. So did the hours before any of them, and so do the matches now that the breakthrough has already happened.
That understanding stretches back to his time at Stanford.
Fery shared a college environment with Nishesh Basavareddy and Tristan Boyer, and what once amounted to teammates practicing and competing alongside one another has become something remarkable in retrospect: three players from the same Stanford team reaching the top 100.
“In the moment, maybe you don’t think it’s necessarily possible to have three guys like that in the top 100 from your team,” Fery said. “But, yeah, it’s great. Everyone just keeps working hard, and, you know, it shows that the hard work pays off, year after year after year of practicing, playing matches, putting an effort into improving.”
The phrase “year after year after year” is significant.
Breakthroughs tend to be remembered as moments. Fery talks about his as accumulation.
“And, yeah, definitely the matches in college helped, being around those guys and, yeah, just the hours of intentional practice on court and everything,” he said. “It just all adds up.”
Now the work has become more specific because the level Fery is chasing has changed.
Breaking into the top 100 was a target. Having accomplished it, he has spoken about what would be required to move toward the top 30. The question is no longer simply whether his tennis belongs at tour level, but how he can make the parts of his game that already work coexist with the parts that still need to evolve.
At the moment, two areas stand out.
“But, yeah, trying to—yeah, trying to develop my serve and my forehand primarily is going to be the two biggest areas of improvement for my game in the next two months,” Fery said, “and then combine that with the things that I’m doing well already, and I should see an improvement in—yeah, I should see, or keep seeing, good results and rise in the rankings if I keep developing that.”
His serve presents a particularly complicated version of that process. Fery is making adjustments to his motion while managing an arm issue, meaning the goal is simultaneously improvement and sustainability.
“I’m double-faulting at times, losing my first serve a lot. So it’s still a big work in progress, trying to find a motion that, for one, doesn’t hurt my arm and, two, I can perform with.”
But the injury is only one example of a larger principle Fery returns to repeatedly: adaptation is not something a player finishes.
“Yeah, well, right now I’m making adjustments to my serve,” he said. “But in general, yeah, you always have to adjust and adapt.”
That philosophy helps explain why Fery can simultaneously appreciate his progress and remain so occupied by what is unfinished.
There is also a longer perspective behind it.
Before the top 100, before Stanford, before Grand Slam main draws, there was simply a kid from Wimbledon playing tennis. Asked what he would tell young players hoping to someday make the same transition, Fery immediately emphasized how much gets erased when a career is summarized by its beginning and its present.
“Yeah, I mean, yeah, a kid from Wimbledon and now playing pro—it seems like just two things, but it’s 15 years apart, 20 years apart. It’s a really, really long journey.”
For a young player living inside that journey, Fery believes perspective and the people surrounding them matter.
“So you’ve just got to, I would say, try and—yeah, try and have, even though it’s tough when you’re 15, that objectivity, but have the right coaches and the right people around you,” he said.
“And, yeah, just keep working hard. Sometimes it’s tough. There are a lot of tough moments, but, yeah, just keep practicing, keep thinking about what you’re doing and working hard.”
That may ultimately be the thread connecting Fery’s week in Winston-Salem to everything that came before it.
A straight-sets victory can contain service games he wants to improve. A top-100 breakthrough can immediately create a top-30 ambition. A Wimbledon run can coexist in his memory with a comeback in Miami qualifying. Years at Stanford that once felt like ordinary practices and matches can, in retrospect, become part of the explanation for how he got here.
Fery does not seem particularly interested in treating progress as a destination.
The point is to notice what worked, identify what did not, and return to work on it.
There is always another answer to find.
For Fery, that is the beauty of it.
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