The ATP ACES For Charity grants once again made a major impact in 2018, with the recipients, who each received $/€15,000, using the funds for worthy causes.

Those recipients as well as many other players on the ATP World Tour showed that their impact extends far beyond the tennis court with their charity work this season. Here are some highlights of various charitable deeds the world’s best tennis players did this year:

– Novak Djokovic visited the Miami Children’s Museum ahead of the Miami Open presented by Itau to read a book titled Pete the Cat to about 50 children of different age groups in a packed auditorium.

That’s not the only education Djokovic has been involved in, as the Serbian’s Novak Djokovic Foundation continued to support the Djokovic Science and Innovation Fellowship at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. The fellowship supports doctoral research into childhood development.

– Roger Federer competed in the ‘Match For Africa 5’ in March, joined by Bill Gates, Jack Sock and others in San Jose, California, to raise money for his Roger Federer Foundation.

Federer traveled to Zambia in April in support of his foundation, as well. The Swiss superstar visited educational programmes and spoke with students and parents who benefit from foundation-funded projects. Federer also made sure to partake in some of the local fun, kicking around a football with children and dancing with the boys and girls. 

– Rafael Nadal led a minute of silence with staff and players at the Rafa Nadal Academy by Movistar in October for those affected by floods in Mallorca. Nadal spent three hours helping with the cleanup, and he also opened up rooms at his academy for at least 50 people who needed refuge. In December, he donated €1 million to those affected.

– Nick Kyrgios practised with students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — where a shooting on 14 February resulted in the loss of 17 students and teachers — during the Miami Open presented by Itau. After his third-round win, the Australian invited the school’s tennis teams to his practice the following day.

In addition to various instances in which he hit with children on-site at events, Kyrgios has also been making progress with his NK Foundation, which was created to serve underprivileged youth. In tandem with Legends United, NK Foundation launched a memorabilia auction in October, helping to raise money for charity.

– Kyrgios participated in the Get Set Games Charity Challenge at the Kaleen Tennis Club in Canberra, Australia, in December, raising more than $5,000 for his self-named foundation. The Aussie made a special bond with an eight-year-old girl named Loga Gandhi, who for the past 18 months has been recovering from a bone marrow transplant that was performed to treat leukemia.

– Horia Tecau first published a children’s book in Romanian in 2016. But this year, he was able to further spread the lessons he’s learned on his journey to becoming a professional tennis player. Tecau donated hundreds of copies of his book, which was newly translated into English, Life Is Like A Tennis Game, at the US Open.

“When I first started thinking about making this book, it was a passion and I wanted to share it with more and more kids. I launched it in 2016 in Romanian,” Tecau said. “Because of the funds that we got from the ATP, we were able to translate it, to ship it, and to donate it here at Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day.

– Aisam-Ul-Haq Qureshi‘s Stop War Start Tennis, a 2018 ATP ACES For Charity grant recipient, is on a mission to spotlight existing projects around the world through official visits, while assessing the needs of local partners and also verifying that donations are being used transparently. The foundation visited Cambodia, where it had donated wheelchairs to local projects.

– Emilio Sanchez Vicario and Feliciano Lopez announced the creation of the 2018 Casper Tour, a series of junior tennis events that were held to honour the life of Casper Fernandez, a student at Academia Sánchez-Casal in Florida who passed away last July after a battle against bone cancer at the age of 16.

Players ages nine through 14 were allowed to compete, with draws for each individual age group. That was done to maximise the amount of time juniors get on the court in a competitive environment, rather than forcing them to play against kids older than them.

– The Gazprom Hungarian Open, a 2018 ATP ACES For Charity grant recipient, held a successful kids’ day during this year’s tournament that benefitted more than 400 children. The event also donated three junior-sized sports wheelchairs, which kids used to play tennis with the help of wheelchair tennis instructors and ATP World Tour pros.

– Hans Podlipnik-Castillo, a 2018 ATP ACES For Charity grant recipient continued pursuing his mission with Futuros para el Tenis, a foundation, of helping young children at social risk obtain university scholarships around the world through tennis and education. The Chilean has both gotten on court with the children to help positively influence them as well as worked to garner support for the foundation.

– Former ATP World Tour players Andy Roddick, Mark Knowles, Tommy Haas and Taylor Dent, along with current player Mitchell Krueger participated in the third edition of the Dirk Nowitzki Pro Celebrity Tennis Classic in Dallas, Texas. The tennis players joined Dirk Nowitzki, the NBA star, to raise money for the Dirk Nowitzki Foundation in support of the health, wellbeing and education of children.

– Next Gen ATP Finals champion Stefanos Tsitsipas raised money in support the victims of Greek wildfires, which resulted in dozens of deaths and affected countless more people. Tsitsipas began a Facebook fundraiser to raise money. Tsitsipas also penned a first-person essay to help raise awareness of the fires and express how much his country means to him.

– Bob Bryan, Mike Bryan, Frances Tiafoe, John Isner, Kevin Anderson and Sam Querrey donated $19,500 that were used to resurface two courts in Sunnyside, Houston, which were affected by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Not only did the ATP World Tour stars help monetarily, but the Bryans, Isner, Tiafoe, Querrey and Steve Johnson visited the courts to hit with about 40 local children who use the courts regularly.

– Bob Bryan, Mike Bryan, Milos Raonic, Andy Roddick, Kevin Anderson, Frances Tiafoe, Mardy Fish, Gaston Gaudio, Fabio Fognini, Guillermo Canas, Jean-Julien Rojer and Reilly Opelka were the ATP World Tour players who joined golf legend Jack Nicklaus for the the “Fore Love” tournament, which combines golf and tennis pro-ams, and raised $1.1 million for the Bryan Bros. Foundation and the Nicklaus Children’s Health Care Foundation.

– Kevin Anderson helped raise more than $100,000 at his inaugural Grand Slam Cause For the Paws, supporting South Florida dog rescue Dezzy’s Second Chance and Ocean Conservancy’s Trash Free Seas Alliance with the help of Tennys Sandgren, Bob Bryan, Mike Bryan along with other tennis stars.

–Tommy Robredo was named the recipient of the Arthur Ashe Humanitarian Award in the 2018 ATP World Tour Awards presented by Moët & Chandon. The Spaniard, who launched the Tommy Robredo Foundation in 2009, pushes to encourage sports training for the disabled.

– The ATP implemented a wave of new initiatives at this year’s Nitto ATP Finals to ensure the season finale was the most sustainable tournament since the prestigious season-ending event moved to London in 2009.

For the first time, each player and their teams were provided with optional re-usable bottles for their on-court drinks, while sealed glass bottles were provided in the player locker rooms and bedrooms for the preparation of their on-court drinks. Water coolers and fountains were also placed at various points backstage for tournament staff and media, along with the provision of reusable water bottles to reduce the number of plastic water bottles used over the duration of the tournament.

Additionally, for the first time at the season-ending event, The O2 worked in partnership with Stack-Cup to provide fans with reusable cups for alcoholic drinks purchased at the venue, which they were able to return or take home. This significantly reduced the number of plastic bottles and single-use plastic drinks containers sold, with an estimate 50,000 single-use plastic cups removed from the event waste stream.

On Sunday, ATPTour.com looked at how the Top 10 players in the ATP Rankings stacked up against one another statistically in 2018. Continuing our 2018 in Review series, we take a broader look at the ATP Tour, using Infosys ATP Scores & Stats to examine which players on the entire circuit excelled in all of the key service and return categories this year, and how that helped shape their results.

All statistics are based off of Infosys ATP Scores & Stats’ Individual Match Stats Leaderboard, which includes players who competed in a minimum of 40 tour-level main draw matches in 2018.

Service Games Won
Roger Federer has finished inside the Top 10 in service games won in every year since 2002 with the exception of 2016, in which he missed time due to injury, and therefore did not qualify for the Individual Match Stats Leaderboard. At 37 years old, Federer won a higher rate of service games than anyone except 6’10” John Isner. Isner’s 93.6 winning percentage in service games is the best rate of his career.

Aces
Two players cracked the 1,000-aces benchmark for the fourth time in five seasons. Isner was one of those two players in three of those four years.

^{*does not abide by 40-match rule}
First-Serve Points Won
Milos Raonic had previously led the ATP Tour in first-serve points won three times (2011-13). But the Canadian set a career-best mark by claiming 83.0 per cent of those points this year.

Second-Serve Points Won
Perhaps this Top 5 list is no surprise, as Isner, Federer, Raonic, Kevin Anderson and Juan Martin del Potro are five of the biggest servers on the ATP Tour. But could you guess who was sixth and seventh in second-serve points won in 2018? It was two players who stand 5’10”: Philipp Kohlschreiber (56.6%) and Kei Nishikori (54.9%).

Return Games Won
One year ago, Argentine Diego Schwartzman announced himself as one of the best returners in the world, winning a higher rate of return games than anyone. And in 2018, he backed up that performance, finishing second in the category behind only Rafael Nadal and climbing as high as No. 11 in the ATP Rankings.

Break Points Converted
Break points are as pressure-filled as they come in tennis, and Frenchman Gael Monfils did the best job of converting his opportunities in 2018. For nearly every one in two chances he had this season, ‘La Monf’ was able to capture a break. Nitto ATP Finals champion Alexander Zverev broke serve more than anyone else, doing so 252 times at a rate of 42.1 per cent, which places him in 12th place on this list.

First-Return Points Won
If someone told you that two players have finished inside the Top 5 in first-return points won in each of the past two seasons, Nadal would be a fairly safe guess as one of those players. But the second is Damir Dzumhur, who finished inside the Top 50 of the ATP Rankings for the second consecutive year. He also earned his third ATP Tour title at the Turkish Airlines Open Antalya.

Second-Return Points Won
Frenchman Gilles Simon enjoyed a resurgent year, climbing from No. 89 to No. 30 in the ATP Rankings. He can credit some of that success to his performance returning second serves, winning 54.3 per cent of those points. The last time Simon cracked the Top 10 in this category in a season was 2009, when he claimed 53.8 per cent of second-serve return points.

View the rest of ATPTour.com’s 2018 In Review series.

Finishing a season inside the Top 10 of the ATP Rankings is an outstanding achievement. To get there, players must distinguish themselves in various facets of the sport.

Thanks to Infosys ATP Scores & Stats, ATPTour.com can show you how the Top 10 players compare to one another in many key statistical categories in both serve and return games. In 2018, Rafael Nadal led the Top 10 in six of nine key serve and return categories, helping him finish inside the Top 2 of the year-end ATP Rankings for the 10th time.

All statistics are based off of Infosys ATP Scores & Stats’ Individual Match Stats Leaderboard, which includes players who competed in a minimum of 40 tour-level main draw matches in 2018.

Return Games Won
Juan Martin Del Potro’s return to the Top 5 was aided by improved performance in his return games, as the Argentine won his highest percentage of those games since 2011 (in years he has played 40+ matches).

First-Serve Return Points Won
Alexander Zverev improved tremendously on his first-serve return this season, bumping his winning percentage up four points. If the German won 28.4 per cent of his first-serve return points in 2018, he would have finished 27th on the ATP Tour and eighth among Top 10 players.

Second-Serve Return Points Won
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nadal and Djokovic finished inside the Top 3 in three of the four major return categories in 2018. That showed in their year-end ATP Ranking, with Djokovic returning to World No. 1 and Nadal finishing at No. 2.

Break Points Converted
This was the Top 10’s worst category of the bunch in 2018. On average, they finished 27th in break points converted. 

Break Points Saved
Nadal was especially strong when facing break point in 2018. Entering the year, his career winning percentage saving break points was 66.3 per cent. 

Service Games Won
It’s no surprise that John Isner led the pack in service games won, claiming 93.6 per cent of those games. The American was broken just 55 times in 54 matches in 2018.

Aces
Isner surpassed 1,000 aces for the sixth time in his career, leading the ATP Tour in the category for a record-tying sixth time.

*does not abide by the 40-match rule

First-Serve Points Won
Roger Federer’s 80.2 per cent winning rate on first-serve points was the best mark of his career. Former World No. 3 Milos Raonic, while not inside the Top 10 in the ATP Rankings, topped this category in 2018.

Second-Serve Points Won
Nadal wins more second-serve points on the ATP Tour than anyone else for the second consecutive year. Djokovic topped the list in 2015-16.

View the rest of ATPTour.com’s 2018 In Review series.

Alex de Minaur finished 2018 in a very different position than he started it in. The teenage Australian arrived in Brisbane this year at No. 208 in the ATP Rankings, needing a wild card to get into the main draw of the ATP Tour 250 event.

But that is where De Minaur’s dream season began, reaching the semi-finals. Then it was his first tour-level championship-match appearance in Sydney. The #NextGenATP star had won just two tour-level matches before the year, but he’d earn 28 victories in 2018. And now, after qualifying for the Next Gen ATP Finals in Milan, where he advanced to the final, the World No. 31 is hungry for more.

De Minaur spent a week in early December training under the tutelage of former World No. 1 Lleyton Hewitt and legendary coach Tony Roche — who has worked with Ivan Lendl, Patrick Rafter, Roger Federer and Hewitt — with other Australian players, including John Millman, Marc Polmans and Alex Bolt.

“There are a couple areas in his game he’s got to keep working on and obviously fitness-wise this has been a good year because the past two years he’s had to sort of set himself up for the Australian Open Wild Card Play-off [in early December],” Hewitt said. “You don’t have that many opportunities throughout a year to come together and do a training block and we see this as a massive opportunity to set the tone for the following year, for 2019, and hopefully the guys can see the intensity and the effort.”

De Minaur is known for his speed on the court. And while some players take time to build up their conditioning as they get used to the rigours of the ATP Tour, the Aussie has proven he is fit to compete with some of the best players in the world.

But that hasn’t stopped him from pushing to improve. More than 160,000 people have watched an Instagram video of De Minaur diving to the bottom of a pool, picking up a weight and swimming along the bottom of the pool with it all the way to the other side without taking a breath. It’s safe to say the 19-year-old has an impressive lung capacity.

And while it’s clear De Minaur is working hard, his brother, Dominic de Minaur, says that his sibling’s toughness on court is just part of who he is as a person.

“What you see is what you get with Alex. He’s an incredible young man, he tries his heart out and every time he goes out on the court I know that he’s going to leave it all out there,” De Minaur said. “The way he holds himself and the way he tries on the court, it’s just amazing to watch.”

De Minaur still has two more years as a #NextGenATP player. But he has already earned the respect of his fellow players. Twenty-nine-year-old compatriot Millman, who himself had a breakthrough year in 2018 — reaching a career-high World No. 33 in June — first met De Minaur two years ago during a Davis Cup tie, and he immediately took notice.

“He really impressed me back then. He was a little bit younger then, a little bit more raw. But the way he comes out on court, the enthusiasm he shows, the energy he brings, I think it’s really special. And what he did this year, I thought was incredible,” Millman said. “To come from in the 200s to sit at around 30 at his age, the sky’s the limit for him.”

Watch A Day In De Minaur’s Life:

Now, as the off-season winds down, De Minaur will return to where his breakthrough started, in Brisbane and then Sydney. But this time, all eyes will be on him.

“There’s a lot of media attention around him and playing in those Brisbane and Sydney events leading into the Australia Open, the biggest thing as it gets closer is he needs to embrace it,” Hewitt said. “He’s 19 years old. This is what you want to do. This is a great opportunity to play in some of the biggest events in your home country. He can be playing a lot of those matches on Centre Court with a full crowd behind him, and it’s about embracing it.”

De Minaur is not worried about the hype, and the pressure that comes with his 2018 breakthrough. The 19-year-old is simply focused on taking what he learned and applying it as best he can to continue his climb.

“I have a great team of guys around me that help keep me grounded and focused on the important things in life,” De Minaur said. “I’ve just got to keep doing what I’m doing.”

It’s no secret that the #NextGenATP Class of 2017 took the ATP Tour by storm in 2018. In fact, four players who competed at the inaugural Next Gen ATP Finals in Milan finished this season inside the Top 25 of the ATP Rankings.

Karen Khachanov (No. 11), Borna Coric (No. 12), Daniil Medvedev (No. 16) and Hyeon Chung (No. 25) climbed a combined 152 spots in the Rankings in 2018 and won a total of seven ATP Tour titles. So who might make a jump like that from the #NextGenATP Class of 2018?

Taylor Fritz (World No. 49)
Fritz cracked the Top 50 of the ATP Rankings for the first time this October, but he is not a new face in the tennis world. In February 2016, in just his third tour-level event, Fritz became the youngest American to reach a championship match on the ATP Tour since Michael Chang in 1988. John Isner was the quickest American to reach his maiden final, doing so at his second tour-level event, at Washington, D.C., in 2007.

While Fritz holds just a 1-7 record against opponents inside the world’s Top 10, the American has proven he is capable of competing against the very best in the sport. Fritz has not lost in straight sets against anyone inside the Top 10 in his past six clashes against the elite group, pushing Roger Federer to three sets on grass as an 18-year-old, and extending this year’s Nitto ATP Finals champion, Alexander Zverev, to five sets at Wimbledon just six months ago.

Andrey Rublev (World No. 68)
It’s been clear for the past two years that Rublev is one of the biggest hitters from the baseline on the ATP Tour. But there’s no reason to believe the 2017 Plava Laguna Croatia Open Umag champion cannot continue improving.

Rublev climbed as high as No. 31 in the ATP Rankings earlier this year after reaching the final of the Qatar ExxonMobil Open in Doha. But a lower back injury kept the Russian out for three months, and he was forced to spend the end of the year rounding back into form. Rublev found a good level again in November, finishing in third at the Next Gen ATP Finals. And now that he’s healthy, Rublev can ride that momentum into a strong 2019.

Jaume Munar (World No. 81)
The Spaniard, who is mentored by World No. 2 Rafael Nadal — training at his academy in Mallorca — began 2018 just inside the Top 200 of the ATP Rankings. But he took a major step forward this year, reaching the semi-finals at the Generali Open in Kitzbuhel and making the last four of the Next Gen ATP Finals in Milan.

But perhaps the most revealing victory of his season was in the first round at Roland Garros, where Munar overcame a two-set deficit to beat his idol and clay-court legend David Ferrer. That win showed the world that Munar is not afraid of the big stage, and with plenty of experience gained this year — the 21-year-old earned 10 of his 11 tour-level match wins in 2018 — he can take another step forward in 2019.

Hubert Hurkacz (World No. 87)
The Polish No. 1 might not have been on many people’s radar when he began 2018 as the World No. 238. But Hurkacz had a breakthrough season, going 28-12 on the ATP Challenger Tour and winning his first two titles at that level. He also qualified for the Next Gen ATP Finals, and earned seven of his eight tour-level wins this season.

For those who have not seen Hurkacz play, his game is reminiscent of a young Tomas Berdych. Hurkacz, like Berdych, is 6’5”; he gains control of points with his serve and has relatively flat groundstrokes from the baseline. As the Pole grows older and adds muscle, he will be able to dominate rallies against plenty of players on the ATP Tour.

Reilly Opelka (World No. 100)
Few #NextGenATP Class of 2018 graduates will carry as much momentum into 2019 as Opelka, who won back-to-back ATP Challenger Tour events in Knoxville, Tennessee and Champaign, Illinois to wrap up his 2018 season. Those victories helped the American crack the Top 100 of the ATP Rankings for the first time.

Opelka ranked second on the ATP Challenger Tour this year with a 75.6 winning percentage (34-11), reaching nine semi-finals at that level. Opelka also earned his first win against a Top 10 opponent, beating Jack Sock en route to the quarter-finals of the Delray Beach Open by VITACOST.com. The 2016 Atlanta semi-finalist will look to become a mainstay on the ATP Tour next year.

Catch up on the rest of ATPTour.com’s 2018 In Review series.