Vasque, Alexander

Alexander is a hereditary athlete: his grandfather won the German national figure skating championship, his father Andreas is a banker who plays tennis in his free time, including in the country's club championship. Alexander’s mother is Gudrun, he also has a brother Sebastian.

The German first tried himself in tennis at the age of two, but seriously engaged in this sport only at fourteen, then immediately switched to club and professional tournaments. In 1997-2000, Vasque studied in the United States : at the San Diego State University and played for him at the NCAA .

The best shot by a German is serving, favorite coverings are of a fast type (grass, hard hall and carpet).

In parallel with his studies in North America, Alexander began to try himself in various competitions of the protour in the USA and in Europe. After spending his first matches at a similar level in 1998, Vasque spent four years. to go from local victories and even titles on futures and satellites to a place in the Top200 single classification. In October 2000, the first relatively major success in the German career came - the first title in the ATP Challenger category - in Guadalajara, Alexander and Hugo Armando won the pair competition. Tournaments in a duet and later on turned out to be much better for Vaske, but his main goal of participating in the protest for a long time was just single events, where any major successes were extremely meager and instead of playing a stable couple with someone who could become one of the strongest in the world, the German preferred to play small tournaments, maintaining his single rating as much as possible.

In 2001, the first major success came as part of the main ATP tour : Alexander, together with the Swiss Ivo Heuberger, reached the semi-finals of the competition in Doha , simultaneously leaving Karim Alami / Hisham Arazi and Nenad Zimonich / David Brought out of work . The first doubles final at this level had to wait another four years - only in April 2005, with the support of Florian Mayer , did Vaske get to this stage at a tournament in Munich . The level of results was also gradually rising in the singles: a series of consistently high results on the “challengers” allowed us to enter and gain a foothold in the second hundred by the end of 2002, but the German was also much more difficult to get further, as a result, over the next four years it was not difficult to climb in the first hundred, at the same time having chalked up five titles in the ATP sub-elite tour. Several times Vasque played in the main draw of the Grand Slam tournaments in singles, but only won at least twice the match - at Wimbledon in 2002 he broke the resistance of Andrea Gaudenzi , and at Roland Garros four years later - Fernando Vicente . In 2005, his most significant single-player victory came to Vaska - at the grass prize in Hull, he was able to beat Rafael Nadal , who had previously been unbeatable for protest competitions for several months.

Having reached an acceptable level of results in singles, the German began to appear more and more often in major tournaments and in pairs: in January 2005, a random alliance with Jürgen Meltzer did not work as expected - the German-speaking couple outplayed the first pair of seeding in the first round of the Australian Open - Mark Knowles and Daniel Nestor and, ultimately, reached the semifinals. In the summer, Alexander paired with Rainer Shuttler reached the quarterfinals of Wimbledon , and a year later reached the semi-finals at Roland Garros - already with Andrei Pavel . The pair with the Romanian and another compatriot - Michael Colman - was one of the most successful in Alexander's career: together with Pavel, he played two of his most status finals in his career in protour - in Rotterdam and Barcelona , and with Michael he played half of his finals in protour on top level. In 2007-11, the German sharply reduced the number of his appearances in protour, struggling with pain in the elbow and having done four operations on it. ^[2] In October 2011, Vaske last played in the final of the ATP doubles tournament: in Bangkok , and in the fall of the following year he completed an active playing career.

In 2004-07, Vasque was called up several times in the country’s national team in the Davis Cup , having managed to play for him in nine meetings (including one single) and losing only one match. In the same period, he played for the German team in the team world cup and twice reached the tournament finals.

In 2010, Alexander, together with compatriot Rainer Schuttler, organized a joint tennis university in Offenbach . ^[3] Soon, a number of former and current relatively well-known tennis players from Germany and the world began to work in the club, including one of the leaders of German women's tennis of that time - Angelica Kerber and Andrea Petkovich . Vasque himself tried himself not only in administrative work, but also in coaching, helping compatriot Tommy Haas to prepare for the tournament. ^[four]

• Profile on ATP website

• Profile on ITF website
• Profile on the Davis Cup website

• Waske / Schuttler Academy website (link unavailable) (German )