For two weeks of January in Australia, the tennis world is obsessed with the way in which Madison Keys“ husband and coach, Bjorn FratangeloJuggled with her two roles.
Keys stamped with an Australian open titlePlaying the best tennis of his life in the third and last sets of his last two games, getting rid of the expectations that had defined his career for 16 years to finally achieve them.
Sitting alongside Fratangelo, in the box of coaches at the corner of the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne, someone in American sport could be more used to seeing Monday evening football – and he was spotted Ben SheltonS’s box too.
Reshard Langford, a former defensive back of American football, was with the Chiefs of Kansas City of the Nfl Between 2009 and 2011, playing in 17 games. Rapid advance of 13 years and it is as surprised as anyone who had something even beyond a first row seat for an epic race for the Grand Slam, while also driving a shotgun for the push of Shelton in his second semi-final of the Grand Chelem at the same tournament.
Return to 2018, when Langford began to train tennis players as a strength and packaging coach at the United States Tennis Association (USA), and he only learned the Way of Sports with blurred yellow balls. “I started doing research,” said Langford, during an interview in February, of his first days by working in tennis. “I knew how the score works, how the matches work, how you win a match. Even terminology. Everything was so new.
Today, he has two of the best American sports players, and many others, swearing through his work, not only on their bodies but also their mind.
“’Lang’ has been invalidable asset to my team,” Keys Wrote in a message from orlando, fla., Where she had spews a few weekes Recovering from an exhausting month of non-stop tennis-and winning-in Australia Before Heading for the Ongoing Bnp Paribas Open at Indian wellsCalifornia.
“I have an incredible chance to be surrounded by such incredible people who challenge me both physically and mentally, while pushing me to kiss my most vulnerable self. His energy and dedication are really inspiring and motivates me every day, ”added Keys.
Tennis launches characters like Langford occasionally. Even with the most limited exhibition, they suddenly find themselves training the best players in the world. They must understand how to adapt the knowledge they have perfected in their specialty to the quirks of a sport that requires a very specific set of skills.
Jason Stacy, the coach of fitness and spirit for Keys’ opponent defeated the opponent in this Melbourne final, Aryna Sabalenka, started on this path 20 years ago when a friend asked him to help Dimitry Tursunov, who would later hire Stacy to help train Sabalenka. Stacy was an expert in Brazilian Jewish at the time. Tennis? Not so much.
Gil Reyes was the coach of the strength and packaging of the Basketball Program at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Andre Agassi brought him on board at the end of the 1980s and credited her with his average and late success.
Like them, Langford, 39, landed in tennis by chance.
He grew up in Alabama and played football at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., The most academic school of the Southeast elite conference. Relays with the Lions of Detroit and the Eagles of Philadelphia have sandwiched his stay at the Chiefs.
After the end of his stay in the NFL, Langford worked as a personal coach when he reconnected with one of his former NFL strength coaches, Brent Salazar. In 2017, the USTA hired Salazar to fulfill the new role of performance director. Salazar asked Langford if he wanted to come to the USTA training center and try to work in a new sport.
It was at this point that the stuffing started, during which Langford discovered that his preconceived ideas on tennis players were almost entirely wrong. Coming from the NFL, where some players weigh more than 300 pounds, he thought that everyone would seem small and weak in comparison. His image of a tennis player was someone skinny and puny.
Then he went to Indian Wells in March 2018 and saw the players training and playing, both on the ground and on the solid field that works like a playground as much as a warm -up and cooling area. He quickly realized that modern tennis pros were larger, stronger and faster than he had considered it.
“It was a shock,” he said. “I didn’t know anything.”
His eyes told him that there were a certain amount of overlap.
Like every athlete of almost all sports, tennis players need a strong “sports base”, as he calls it. They must be able to generate power from a stable starting position, even when they enter this position after hitting another blow. They must be able to use the soil as a source of energy.
This did not become more vital during his seven years on tours, because things have become more physical. Tennis, said Langford, is more and more like all other sports every year.
It always brings many specific requirements, including an endurance capacity whose rhythms of sport need. The points last somewhere between one and 45 seconds. Then comes about 25 seconds of rest and recovery. Then another explosion, with matches that may continue in this way for hours and hours.
Langford likes to put players on an exercise bike and briefly increase the intensity and resistance, before returning to a lower speed rate. Then he makes them repeat this cycle again and again, to imitate a tennis match.
During the recovery elements, he asks them questions about their lives and how they experience the pressures of this training and the competition they face. “If you can’t have a conversation with me, I know we are doing things a little too hard,” he said.
Shelton has been a disciple of Langford since his pro return in 2022, and worked closely with him since he moved to Orlando de Gainesville, also in Florida, last fall. In Indian Wells in 2023, the two drew attention while Langford directed models of NFL and Shelton style passes in junior skills of football quarter, launching passes through the sprawling lawn of grass players.
Shelton says that Langford has an acute feeling of when to push and when to hold back. This is particularly important since Shelton, an American football player in his youth, never stands out a challenge to the gymnasium or on the track, even when he hangs out and should probably.
“I am never a person who will say no,” said Shelton, in an interview in early February, about his relationship with Langford. “It is important to have someone who can find this balance for me.”
In the case of Shelton, Langford also brings something else to the table. Every day, he is with him, there is a dose of humility. “There is no elevator, racing or force competition in which I can beat him,” said Shelton.
Langford spent most of his time working with younger players and less seasoned last year when Keys asked if he could help him. While they were talking, there was a mind on their trips as professional adhesive. The two had struggled to take advantage of the pursuit of their dreams – to be satisfied with who they were, even when the results were not lining up with what they could have hoped for.
This connection has contributed to bringing a level of confidence. Langford has seen in the keys what everyone has seen for a long time: an almost unequaled power and the natural capacity to transfer this from earth and high through its kinetic chain.
He noticed something else, however – something that Fratangelo had also picked up. Her intensity in training did not correspond to the intensity for which she endeavored in the training sets and the matches. There was a disparity in its levels of discomfort according to the pressure, and therefore when things went on the side, as for almost all the players for the stretches of each match, it began to untangle because it was uncomfortable.
During the dead, Langford tried to put keys in situations where she was not comfortable. He asked her to do things she didn’t like to do, like pull -ups. Keys has always hated pull -ups. And pumps. She also hates that.
Langford told her that there was no other way to build resilience in her shoulders she was going to need matches, especially in tournaments, when things get very difficult and players must understand how to keep their cool.
While Langford was sitting on Rod Laver Arena in January and looked at Keys to distance against the two best players in the world, Iga świątek and Sabalenka, he noticed a kind of serenity about him. Fratangelo leaned from Langford and told him that he had never seen her so calm in a match. “She seemed motionless,” said Langford. “Comfort and discomfort have become one thing for it. And it’s really cool to see.
His work with Shelton is similar but different.
Shelton has never been opposed to go to the edge or to training or competition. It remains calm once it can make challenges. He has strength to burn, but always learns to put his body in the right position to capitalize on it. “I can be a little frustrated by myself,” says Shelton. “Lang worked with me on how to focus on my breathing and bring everything back.”
Langford does not claim to be an expert in the tennis movement. Shelton spent a large part of 2024 working in close collaboration with the specialist in force and packaging Gabriel Echevarria on this front. Langford, however, spent a lot of time on the field with the best coaches in the USTA learning what players must overcome during a point to put themselves in the right position to make the best possible plans.
The balance, he said, has never been so important, especially in the male game, and it takes a huge amount of energy to obtain it, something whoever has already played high-level football-and perhaps even recreational tennis-can understand. And it is hardly the only similarity.
Football, says Langford, is the duration of the duration of the ball and taking time and opportunities far from your opponents. Tennis, he has managed to learn, is not so different.
“When you have more time, you hit the right blow,” he says. “What is another way of taking time, which allows you to enter the positions where you have a good balance, so that you can start again.”
And again. And again. And again.
This article originally appeared in Athletics.
Chiefs of Kansas City, NFL, tennis, female tennis
2025 The Athletic Media Company
