Ground Pass Awards 2025: Our Season In 12 Trophies
The end of the tennis season always feels a little surreal. One minute we are glued to late night five setters in Melbourne. Suddenly we are scrolling photos of players in the Maldives and trying to remember what happened back in February. So for this episode, Nick and I decided to solve that problem with our very own award show. Welcome to the 2025 Ground Pass Awards.
Instead of a simple recap, we turned the entire season into a trophy cabinet. We start with favorite tournament of the year and give each nominee its moment. Charleston Open gets crowned the happiest place in tennis, complete with dogs and WTA only good vibes. Ilkley Challenger becomes our quintessential English festival pick, all hills and tents and family days out. Then there is the Citi Open, which ends up taking the trophy on the strength of its compact grounds, stacked field, wild night sessions, and genuinely great food.
From there we dive into the matches that shaped 2025. The Sincaraz Roland Garros final naturally tops the list. Not just for the tennis, but for the way it pulled everyone into one shared conversation. We revisit Madison Keys turning the Australian Open into her own plot twist, Learner Tien’s epic win over Daniil Medvedev, and a bonus pick for Sabalenka vs Raducanu in Cincinnati. It is a reminder that the sport’s biggest stories often come from players who are still in the middle of their own rewrites.
Our breakthrough and most improved categories spotlight the players who quietly redefined their ceilings this year. On the men’s side, we talk about the rise of Jaume Munar, who shed the “dirt baller” label and backed it up from Dallas to Davis Cup. We also look at Ben Shelton’s climb into the top ten and Jack Draper’s Indian Wells title run. On the women’s side, Vicky Mboko goes from hyped prospect to top twenty force, Amanda Anisimova reenters the elite conversation, and Eva Lys turns a lucky loser run in Australia into a life changing season.
Because this is Ground Pass, we also give love to the weird and wonderful. There is an award for biggest plot twist that somehow has to balance Madison Keys winning Melbourne, Carlos Alcaraz losing to David Goffin in Miami, and Felix Auger Aliassime quietly hauling himself back into the top five. We revisit Alex Eala’s breakout week in Miami, the Alcaraz living room photo that did bigger numbers than his Roland Garros trophy post, Eva Lys learning her prize money live on air, and the global takeover of strawberry pasta at Wimbledon.
The final stretch of the episode is all about our people. We crown the tennis story of the year, which could only really be the cousin final in Shanghai, and hand out Ground Pass Player of the Year honors. On the women’s side, the trophy goes to Vicky Mboko after a season that took her from outer courts to home champion in Montreal and a late run in Hong Kong. On the men’s side, we give it to Jaume Munar for turning a supposed supporting role into a season long arc. Of course, Christian Harrison and Evan King are forever honorary Ground Passers.
We wrap with bold predictions for 2026. Nick goes big and calls for a doubles match on primetime television. I double down on small tournaments and predict that the real magic next year will come from events like Charleston, Ilkley and Citi that let fans get close to the action without destroying their budget. If that sounds like your kind of tennis, this episode is your roadmap.
