The one-handed backhand is supposed to be dying. Coaches stopped teaching it, academies moved on, and the modern game’s relentless topspin has made it increasingly difficult to sustain at the top. So we pulled every player in our rankings database — all 2,233 of them — and logged their backhand grip. What we found was more interesting than we expected.
The headline numbers
In the current ATP top 100, 91 players use a two-handed backhand. Only 8 use a one-hander. One player’s grip is unrecorded in the ATP profile data.
| Backhand | Players | Share (of 99 with data) |
|---|---|---|
| Two-handed | 91 | 92% |
| One-handed | 8 | 8% |
Nearly 9 in 10 elite players have moved away from the shot entirely. But here’s the thing — that 8% figure holds remarkably consistently across the ranking spectrum, with one exception:
| Bracket | One-handers | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Top 50 | 4 | 8% |
| Ranks 51–100 | 4 | 8% |
| Ranks 101–200 | 3 | 3% |
| Ranks 201–500 | 24 | 8% |
| Ranks 500+ | 90 | 9% |
The Ranks 101–200 bracket dips to 3% — just 3 players in ~100. With a sample this size, a few players moving in or out of that bracket can shift the figure significantly; it’s likely noise rather than signal. Across every other bracket, the figure sits at 8–9%.
The one-hander isn’t being filtered out at the elite level. From the top 50 all the way down to ranked outside 500, the shot holds a consistent minority share. The players who use it reach the top. There just aren’t many of them left who try.
The 8 survivors
Here they are — every one-handed backhand in the current ATP top 100:
| Rank | Player | Country | Age | Height |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | L. Musetti | Italy | 24 | 185cm |
| 39 | D. Shapovalov | Canada | 26 | 185cm |
| 42 | G. Dimitrov | Bulgaria | 34 | 191cm |
| 43 | S. Tsitsipas | Greece | 27 | 193cm |
| 54 | G. Mpetshi Perricard | France | 22 | 201cm |
| 55 | D. Altmaier | Germany | 27 | 188cm |
| 72 | A. Kovacevic | United States | 27 | 183cm |
| 92 | S. Wawrinka | Switzerland | 41 | 183cm |
A few things stand out immediately.
Mpetshi Perricard is 201cm tall and only 22 years old — the tallest and youngest one-hander in the top 100, turning pro as recently as 2021. The shot is not dying out entirely among the new generation.
Wawrinka is 41 and still ranked. He turned pro in 2002 — the only one-hander in the top 100 whose professional career predates the mid-2000s. His coach is Magnus Norman, the former world #2, who built Wawrinka into a three-time Grand Slam champion with the shot.
Dimitrov’s coach is Xavier Malisse — himself a one-handed backhand player who reached the Wimbledon semi-finals in 2002. One of the few cases on the tour of a coach actively passing the shot on from personal experience.
Tsitsipas is coached by his father, Apostolos Tsitsipas. The family bet on the one-hander when Stefanos was a junior, at a time when most Greek academies had long since switched to two-handed coaching.
Shapovalov is a genuinely unique case: he plays left-handed and uses a one-handed backhand — the only player in the entire top 100 to combine both. Across the full 2,233-player database, only 15 players use that combination at any ranking level.
Are one-handers taller?
Slightly. The average height of the 8 one-handers in the top 100 is 188.6cm, compared to 187.2cm for their two-handed counterparts. The gap isn’t large enough to be conclusive, but it’s consistent with a theory that taller players — with a longer reach and a naturally higher contact point — find the mechanics of the one-hander less punishing against heavy topspin.
They’re older too
The average age of one-handers in the top 100 is 28.5 years, versus 26.5 for two-handers. Two years older, on average.
This likely reflects two things: the shot takes longer to master, so players who use it tend to peak later. And with fewer young players coming through with a one-hander, the current top 100 one-handers skew towards an older cohort who developed the shot before academies fully abandoned it.
Which countries produce the most one-handers?
Looking across the full ranked database:
| Country | One-handed players |
|---|---|
| France | 15 |
| Italy | 13 |
| United States | 11 |
| UK | 10 |
| Germany | 8 |
| Argentina | 5 |
| Australia | 5 |
France tops the list — the same country that has 5 left-handers in the top 100 alone. Whether that reflects something specific in French tennis development or is partly coincidence is hard to say, but France consistently produces players with less conventional technique than the global average.
Italy and the UK both feature prominently, which is consistent with the presence of Musetti and a historically stronger tradition of one-handed coaching in European club tennis.
The France anomaly
Speaking of France: 5 of the top 100 players are both left-handed and French:
| Rank | Player |
|---|---|
| 33 | C. Moutet |
| 34 | U. Humbert |
| 48 | A. Mannarino |
| 52 | T. Atmane |
| 96 | H. Gaston |
Five left-handers from a single country in the top 100 is not a number you’d expect by chance. Something is happening in French tennis that is either identifying left-handers earlier, or simply not coaching it out of them.
The shot that built modern tennis
The irony is that the one-handed backhand’s decline has happened in the shadow of its greatest era. The two players who defined professional tennis for two decades — Roger Federer and Pete Sampras — both used it.
Federer held the world #1 ranking for 310 weeks across his career, the all-time record. His one-handed backhand, particularly the down-the-line winner and the cross-court slice, is widely considered the most technically beautiful shot the sport has ever seen. Sampras dominated the 1990s with 14 Grand Slam titles and 286 weeks at #1 using a flatter, more functional version — a one-hander nonetheless.
Stefan Edberg. Boris Becker. Two Wimbledon champions who made the one-hander the definitive shot of their era. Even among the current generation, Richard Gasquet has sustained a world-class one-hander for two decades — without ever having the shot coached out of him despite its unfashionable status.
The shift since then has been swift. Within roughly 15 years of Federer’s peak, the shot went from routine to rare. Academies watched him win Wimbledon and concluded — correctly, for most players — that his backhand was unreplicable. The two-hander was safer, more consistent, and faster to develop. So that’s what they taught.
Who sits at #1 today?
Carlos Alcaraz — right-handed, two-handed backhand. The top 10 contains just one one-hander: Musetti at #5. The other nine — Alcaraz, Sinner, Djokovic, Zverev, de Minaur, Fritz, Shelton, Auger-Aliassime, Bublik — all two-handed.
What the data actually says
The two-handed backhand dominates in 2026 because it works. It’s easier to generate topspin against a high ball, easier to defend wide, and quicker to develop to a competitive standard. The one-hander’s advantages — disguise, slice, the down-the-line pass — are real but narrow, and they demand exceptional timing that most players never consistently achieve.
But the data doesn’t support the idea that the one-hander is being eliminated by elite competition. At roughly 8% across almost every ranking bracket, the shot holds a stable — if small — place in professional tennis. The players who master it get to the top. There just aren’t many of them left who try.
How this analysis was built
This piece was generated from live data in the Baseline Rank rankings database — 2,233 players, scraped weekly from ATP tour profiles and stored in PostgreSQL. Every number in the tables above came from a direct SQL query against that dataset.
If you’re building a tennis app, player microsite, or sports analytics tool and need structured ATP rankings data without the scraping headache, that’s exactly what the Baseline Rank API provides.
Data sourced from the Baseline Rank rankings database, current as of March 2026. Backhand type, height, and coaching data sourced from ATP tour player profiles. Historical figures (weeks at #1, Grand Slam counts) are publicly documented ATP records.