Jack Draper has a game built for grass, with a left-handed serve and a forehand that do real damage on a low bounce, but injury has limited how often he can use it. A 2026 swing reduced to a single tournament left him 26th in the GTC Grass Rankings with a GTC Grass Rating of 98, down from 114 and 7th before the season.
Grass at a glance
- GTC Grass Rating: 98, 26th in the men’s rankings (7th before the season)
- Pillars: Lawn Form 20, Arsenal 78, Wimbledon 58, Nerve 54
- Nationality: Great Britain
- Best Wimbledon result: Second round (2022, 2024, 2025); boys’ runner-up (2018)
- Grass titles: Stuttgart 2024
- Plays: Left-handed, two-handed backhand
How Jack plays on grass
Draper’s serve is the centre of his grass game. As a left-hander he can swing the ball wide on the advantage side and drag right-handers off the court, then attack the open space with the forehand. On grass that pattern often ends the point within two shots. The backhand is solid and flat, and his return has improved enough to make him a threat in his opponents’ service games, not just a strong holder of his own.
His Arsenal score of 78 is among the highest outside the top 10, and it reflects a game that suits the surface in almost every respect. Movement is the area that has developed most, but grass still asks a lot of a tall player on low balls and sudden changes of direction.
The Lawn Form score of 20 is not a judgement on his tennis. It records how little he has been able to play. His Nerve score of 54 sits in the middle of the field: he has won big matches on grass, but he has not yet had a long run of best-of-five matches at Wimbledon to test it.
Grass record
Draper first showed his grass ability as a junior, reaching the Wimbledon boys’ final in 2018 and losing to Tseng Chun-hsin in three sets. At senior level he reached the Queen’s quarter-finals in 2021 and played Novak Djokovic in the first round of Wimbledon that year. He missed the 2023 grass season through injury.
His breakthrough came in 2024. He won his first ATP title at Stuttgart, beating Matteo Berrettini in the final, and at Queen’s he beat Carlos Alcaraz in straight sets before losing to Tommy Paul in the quarter-finals. Wimbledon has been less kind: second-round exits in 2022, 2024 and 2025, the last to Marin Čilić.
The 2026 grass season
A knee tendon injury, which forced him to retire in Barcelona in April, kept him out of the early grass events and his rating held at 114. He then withdrew from Queen’s because the knee had not fully recovered. His first tournament back was Eastbourne, where he reached the semi-finals before losing to Ugo Humbert 5-7, 3-6. After two months away it was a promising return, and the rating rose to 116.
It did not last. On 29 June, before his first-round match against Taylor Fritz, he withdrew from Wimbledon with a recurrence of bone bruising in his left arm, his serving arm, the injury that had limited him for much of the previous year. He arrived unseeded and ranked around 160. Missing the Championships cost him heavily, and his rating fell from 116 to 98.
Looking ahead to 2027
Everything about Draper’s 2027 grass season depends on his arm and knee. If he is fit, the Arsenal score says he belongs among the leading grass players, and Stuttgart and Queen’s, where he has already beaten top players, are natural starting points. His ranking may mean relying on wildcards at British events, which he would be a strong candidate to receive. The realistic target is a full, uninterrupted swing and a first Wimbledon third round. Anything beyond that would be a bonus after two disrupted years.
